Lewis’ newest venture has a throwback twist
Olympic legend launches club using time-tested tips to develop top athletes
Carl Lewis hopes to recreate track and field history with a new name, some young faces and the same time-tested techniques.
Lewis, the nine-time Olympic gold medalist who along with his Santa Monica Track Club teammates dominated U.S. sprinting for more than a decade, has launched a Houston-based professional track club under the name Team Perfect Method that he hopes to stock primarily with former athletes at the University of Houston.
He also is using the Perfect Method name, based on the techniques he learned from his longtime coach Tom Tellez, to market training tips for recreational athletes and for younger athletes through a partnership with the Amateur Athletic Union.
Along with his business partner, Kerry Sprick, Lewis recently announced plans for a series of training clinics and events in conjunction with the AAU, the 129-yearold organization that promotes amateur sports.
With physical education programs in decline in public schools, Lewis said Perfect Method will offer web seminars, videos and discussion groups that will give runners and jumpers quick access to training tips.
“I drive down the street and see somebody jogging, and I think, ‘I wish their form was better, because they’ll be hurting in two years,’ ” he said. “Or I’ll see a high school kid who says he’s been injured every year, and I can tell him why.”
Prepping future U.S. Olympians
Lewis’ primary role these days is as an assistant track coach at UH, but he also is in the early stages of setting up a postgraduate professional track club, a latter-day counterpart to the Santa Monica Track Club for which he competed after leaving UH, under the Perfect Method umbrella.
“I am focused on getting Americans ready to make the Olympic team,” Lewis said. “Most of the athletes who run for Team Perfect Method will be UH athletes, and UH is allowing us the opportunity to allow athletes to stay in Houston and train here and be part of it.”
The first edition of Team Perfect Method includes sprinter LeShon Collins, the former UH sprinter who was the leadoff runner for the USA Track and Field team that won the 400-meter relay at the recent IAAF world relay championships in the Bahamas.
Collins, 23, is off to a good start this season, with wins at the Texas Relays and Penn Relays in the 100 meters on the heels of a second-place finish at 60 meters in the U.S. indoor championships.
Like Lewis, Collins, who graduated from UH last December, came to Texas from New Jersey to compete at UH. And, like his mentor as a young man, he has big plans.
“Coach Carl is developing miniature Carl Lewises and Leroy Burrells and Floyd Heards,” Collins said. “Don’t tell him, but I think we might even be better than them when all is said and done. We might be even better than Santa Monica.”
Even if Collins can’t reach his loftiest goals, Lewis hopes he and his teammates, including former UH hurdler Issac Williams, will benefit from what Lewis sees as a cradle-to-grave — professionally speaking, of course — incubator for track champions.
“The whole idea is the minute you step on the UH campus, you don’t have to change anything until your career ends,’ Lewis said. “A lot of schools don’t allow that. But I believe Houston is the best city for high school track and field in the country, so it’s about keeping people here.”
Lewis handles coaching for Team Perfect Method with assistance from James Arnett, a former UH sprinter. He said pro athletes who join the team also will work with his longtime teammate, rival and now, his UH boss, Cougars track coach Leroy Burrell, and with Kyle Tellez, an assistant UH coach and son of former UH coach Tom Tellez.
“We have a team management system set up for them, and (the athletes) can set up their own representation. We will populate this team with UH people,” he said.
As UH sprinters Eli Hall and Cameron Burrell, son of Leroy, wrap up their collegiate eligibility, Lewis hopes they will move on to Team Perfect Method and, like Collins, become candidates for individual and relay sports on the national team.
Relays are a special point of emphasis of Lewis, who last year said the U.S. relay program had become an embarrassment and that a retired college coach should be brought in to retool the program.
USA Track and Field earlier this year hired Orin Richburg, a former coach at New Mexico State and Washington, and the team that includes Collins is off to a good start under Richburg’s leadership.
“I am comfortable where we are now,” Lewis said. “We’re all on the same page.”
Hoping to see fewer drug cheats
Lewis also is encouraged by advances in catching drug cheats. At least nine 2012 Olympic medalists in track and field and more than 20 medalists from 2008 have now been stripped of medals as improved testing techniques have uncovered use of banned performance-enhancing drugs.
Among them, interestingly enough, was Jamaican sprinter Nesta Carter, whose disqualification from the 2008 gold medal-winning 400-meter relay team resulted in Usain Bolt losing one of his nine gold medals. That knocked Bolt out of the all-time track and field lead for total golds that he shared with Lewis and Paavo Nurmi.
“We can’t be afraid to try and make the sport totally clean,” Lewis said. “Yes, it’s taking years to catch people, but it’s having an impact on the future.
“If you look at the times from 2012 through 2016, they’ve flat-lined across the board. You can go out and win a medal and get the fame and the money, but if you get busted five years later and get kicked out of the sport, it’s a huge hit that will last the rest of your life. I think it’s affecting people.”