It has been the favourite parlour game of the track and field world these past few weeks after Usain Bolt added world championship domination to his Olympic exploits, continuing to smash world records and push our understanding of how fast a human being can run.
Is Usain Bolt the greatest of all time and is he greater than Carl Lewis?
Bolt says he wants to be the best ever; the man he must overtake to get there is Lewis. So what, says Tom Tellez, the legendary coach who guided Lewis to nine Olympic gold medals?
”I think it’s hard to go past Carl really, as someone who dominated the sport for 18 years and had so much versatility,” he said. ”Carl didn’t run for times, that’s not how we coached him. He was a competitor and he ran to beat the man, not the clock. It’s what we always focused on.”
”I definitely know Carl could have run faster if he was just sprinting,” he says. ”The way he combined sprinting and long jump, I don’t think we’ll see anyone do that again in a hurry. You’d think it would happen more often, you need great speed for long jump, but most coaches now don’t want their sprinters jumping; they worry about injuries……Read More
