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.
