Barcelona ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 13 : Lewis Is Again Good as Gold in Long Jump

Do you have a clue what three centimeters amount to? A little more than the width of your thumbnail. Ten or 20 grains of sand in a row.

But for Mike Powell, three centimeters might as well be a mile. The hole he made coming down in the sand at the Olympic high jump pit was three centimeters short of the one Carl Lewis had made two hours earlier.

It was a melodramatic evening. Lewis had started the competition with a jump of 28 feet 5 1/2 inches.

People thought that was going to be an appetizer. Turned out it was the main course.

For two hours, the best jumpers in the world couldn’t come close. Powell, who jumped 29-4 1/2 last year, was having trouble.

It came down to the last jump of the night. Powell had served notice by jumping 28 feet on his fifth jump--on a night when only three jumps were better than 28 feet.

He stood at the runway. He shook his hands, stared in concentration, then went into that funny, characteristic cakewalk, broke into a run. He hit the mark, leaped . . .

. . . and came down past the 28-foot mark. The crowd roared. Powell leaped from the pit, waved and bowed. Clearly, he thought he had won. Later, he said he “felt” it had been short. But how do you “feel” three centimeters? How do you even detect them?

In a way, Powell almost spoiled a great moment of history.

I guess a lot of people missed Sarah Bernhardt’s farewell tours. Not many people were in the stands for Babe Ruth’s last home run or Ted Williams’ last at-bat. Plenty of people who saw it wished they had missed Joe Louis’ last fight.

We never got to see Jesse Owens make a farewell Olympic appearance. War intervened. He never got to defend his four gold medals.

But, we got to see Carl Lewis make what surely is his farewell Olympic long jump appearance--and go out on a high note.

Carl was never the beloved figure Jesse Owens was. Aloof, austere, difficult, even condescending, he inspired more awe than affection. You didn’t know whether to curtsy or genuflect in his presence.

But for sheer brilliance, we may not see his like again.

Jesse Owens got shortchanged. In a way, Lewis has, too.

You measure excellence by historic comparisons, usually athletic. If a man is a great cook, you say he is the Babe Ruth of cooks. A man drives fast, the cop stops him, pulls out the ticket book and says “OK, Andretti, you’ve just won the pole.”

If you run fast or jump far, you are “a regular Carl Lewis.”

Lewis has been the most consistent and versatile performer in track history for almost a dozen years now. Save for a boycott, he would doubtless be appearing in his fourth Games. It is not likely you will see athletes doubling and tripling in events as Lewis has done.

But, for all its incandescence, Lewis’ career has, in a very real sense, been marked by frustrations. It is as if Ruth hadn’t hit those 60 home runs or Ted Williams never batted .400.

As great as it was, it could have been greater. When he won four gold medals in Los Angeles in 1984, the public carped because he left the long jump pit after leaping only the obligatory 28- 1/4 and passed up trying to improve it to save himself for the 200 meters.

He was the world’s greatest long jumper for 11 years. He broke meet records, piled up gold medals. But, he was really chasing a ghost.

One fantastic afternoon back in October of 1968, a jumper of no particular distinction before that, Bob Beamon, electrified the track world by breaking the world record by almost two feet. No one had ever gone 28 feet before. Beamon went over 29. By 2 1/2 inches. It was so eerie, they blamed the altitude.

The record became the longest-lasting in track history. When Carl Lewis came along, he went 11 years without losing a long jump, and he set out after the record like a Scotland Yard detective on the trail of Jack the Ripper.

He stalked it. He sought it. He dreamed about it. Track aficionados said he actually broke it in the 1982 Sports Festival, but an official thought he detected a foul. He didn’t. There wasn’t one. But the jump was never measured.

One trouble was, Lewis was more than a jumper. He was also the world’s best sprinter. He was the first since Owens to make that difficult double in the Olympics.

Then, in Tokyo last year, he finally jumped 29 feet. Three times. He eclipsed Beamon’s record.

But so did Powell. Only Mike did it by two inches. Lewis did it by a quarter of an inch--and the wind was too high to make it an acceptable jump.

Carl Lewis has seven gold medals and one silver. But, for a moment Thursday night, it seemed his curtain call was going to be on a sad note. A couple of grains of sand the other way and he ends his career shaking hands to congratulate someone else.

It was fitting it didn’t turn out that way, that he went out a winner. I mean, would you want Ted Williams to go out with the bat on his shoulder and the bases loaded? Did you enjoy Louis lying on the canvas, Ali on the ropes unable to fight back in his last title bout?

If it was going to be three centimeters, it is altogether proper that they were on Carl Lewis’ side. He’ll never get his world record now. He’ll never get in another Olympics. He thinks he will but he won’t. He was the only man in history to win the gold medal in the long jump in two Olympics. Now, he has won it in three.

Even the man he beat, Mike Powell, was glad for him.

“Listen, I had to break a 23-year-old record just to beat this guy!” Powell said after the medal ceremony. “I have great respect for Carl Lewis. He’s been my motivator for a long while, ever since I was a high school kid. He’s the best there ever was. Seeing Carl Lewis beat me, I can’t get too upset.”

If the guy he beat by only three centimeters can feel that way, the rest of the world should be throwing its hat in the air. It was poetic justice. Prose, too.

Quantum Leaps

A jump-by-jump look at the medal sweep by the United States in the long jump.

COMPETITOR Carl Lewis 1: 28-5 1/2 2: 27-4 3: Foul 4: Foul 5: 27-10 3/4 6: 27-10 3/4 RESULT 28-5 1/2 COMPETITOR Mike Powell 1: 26-1 2: 26-11 3/4 3: 27-4 4: Foul 5: 28-0 6: 28-4 1/4 RESULT 28-4 1/4 COMPETITOR Joe Greene 1: Foul 2: Foul 3: 25-10 1/4 4: 27-4 1/2 5: 26-8 1/2 6: Foul RESULT 27-4 1/2