Michael Johnson celebrates winning the Men’s 200m at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.
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LONDON — Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson’s sporting career did not get off to the most auspicious start.
“I hated team sports,” he told an audience at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Thursday, referring to a period when he played football.
“I had a great game once when I was playing football and we lost, and we’re on the bus on the way home and everybody’s sad, and I’m thinking: I had a good game. I should be happy,” Johnson said.
“So that told me that I needed to be in individual sport, right?” he added.
In 1987, when Johnson was 19, his future coach Clyde Hart noticed his athleticism while Johnson was studying at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas. He won his first world title at the 1991 athletics World Championships in Tokyo, taking first place in the 200m race.
Johnson said the first half of his track career was about winning. “This is going to sound sort of diabolical, but it was just really about beating people as badly as I possibly could,” he said at CONVERGE LIVE.
Later, he realized that if he was prepared enough, “I was probably going to win the races.” And so he changed his strategy. “Then it became about chasing records and chasing history and trying to do things in the sport that had never been done before,” Johnson said.
He went on to become the only male athlete to take Olympic gold at both the 200m and 400m sprint events, doing so during the 1996 Summer games in Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael Johnson commentating for the BBC at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in 2022.
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Johnson said competing involves a technical approach and “executing the race strategy,” he’d developed with his coach. “[When] I’m running the race, I am constantly assessing if I’m behind or if I’m ahead of where I need to be at certain points on the track and making decisions based on that assessment of whether I need to make an adjustment,” he said. “If you make the wrong decision, it could be catastrophic.”
The athlete said he learned about leadership as captain of the U.S. men’s 4 x 400m relay team at the 1998 Goodwill Games. “You’ve got to bring people together. Everybody has to understand … what the goal is. And you try to get their individual goals … to fit within the broader team goals,” he said.
Johnson founded Grand Slam Track, a sports league that will hold its first event in Kingston, Jamaica, next month, and described himself as being an “entrepreneur” since he retired from competitive sport in 2001.
“I’ve been able to apply a lot of those things that I learned as an athlete … Preparation is everything. You’re trusting the process, but I have a good process, right?” he said.
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