Up And Out, Up And Away—and Upset

Carl Lewis knew it was fast, but not how fast. He had caught Lee McRae of Pitt at 80 meters and won his fourth national 100-meter title going away. As he reached the finish line, he shot an arm up in salute to the crowd at the USA/ Mobil Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Ore., but his expression was intently solemn, almost severe. He turned and strode toward the start.

"I was buzzing," Lewis would say later. "It had been really fast, but I didn't know about the wind." Greg Foster, who 50 minutes earlier on Friday had won the 110-meter hurdles in 13.26, called to him that the wind was legal. "I exploded with excitement," said Lewis. "It was a return of the intensity I had in the '84 trials and Olympics. I felt as if I were 'not human' again, the way I was when people called me a robot."

Lewis's time was 9.91. Calvin Smith's world record is 9.93. But Foster had been wrong; the aiding wind in the 100 was 4.48 meters per second, more than twice the allowable 2.00. Lewis still did not have his first individual world record (he has anchored two 400-meter relay records), but his time equaled the fourth-fastest under any conditions.

Barely 15 minutes later, Lewis moved briskly on to the long jump, which he won at 28'5�". He needed every inch to stay ahead of Mike Conley's 28'3�", a mark that gave Conley the dubious honor of becoming the first man ever to jump 28 feet and lose. Conley knows all about such things. Last year in this meet he became the first man to triple jump 58 feet and be beaten, when Willie Banks hit his world-record 58'11�".

Nor was Conley finished with the bittersweet in Eugene. On Saturday, he triple jumped a wind-aided 58'6�", completing the best combination long jump-triple jump performance in history. And damned if he didn't lose again, this time to Charlie Simpkins's prodigious 58'9�", also wind-aided.

"I am so happy that Mike got all tired out yesterday," said Simpkins.

"And he'll tell me about it," said the brave, patient, smiling Conley after the triple jump. "This puts me in an awkward position. Do I hang my head? No, because I did great. Do I feel wonderful? No, because I lost twice." Conley must have experienced the precise opposite of Lewis's sense of invulnerability.

But Lewis overreached. On Saturday, he found himself in a 200-meter final that he had decided to run only four days before. "I figured, what the heck. My training for the 100 was encouraging, so why not do the 200? That was before I was aware of the turns on this track."

The University of Oregon's Stevenson Track has 110-meter straightaways and tight 90-meter turns. That means the first half of a 200 is run on a sharper than usual curve. The difficulty is most apparent in the inside lanes, and Lewis was in one of them—lane 3.

He started well, so well that as he neared the end of the curve he had to ease back to stay in his lane. "If you're a guy like me, 6'2", with a 36-inch inseam [and if you happen to be sprinting at 22 mph], you've got to cut your stride to get out of those turns."