Lewis Johnson Did His Job

by Julian Spivey

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There were many fantastic Olympic moments and feats that I saw on Friday, August 9, at the Paris Games, but the moment that made me raise an eyebrow in surprise and say, “Let’s go!” didn’t come from one of the athletes but NBC Sports track & field reporter Lewis Johnson.

Johnson has held the position of track and field sideline reporter, essentially, throughout the athletics portion of the Games. He’s worked every Olympics, both Summer and Winter, for NBC Sports since the 2000 Sydney Games. He has interviewed the American athletes following their events — both when they brought home the gold and on Friday night when once again they faltered spectacularly in an event they’ve continuously shot themselves in the foot at in the last two decades of the Olympic Games.

On Friday night, the American men were tasked with the men’s 4x100m relay, considered one of the biggest track events of the Olympics, an event they have struggled in time after time over the last few Olympics with disqualifications due to dropping the baton, other transfer issues and a doping ban that took away a silver medal from the 2012 London Games. The men’s relay team has failed to medal in the 4x100m since the 2004 Athens Games. Since 1995, the U.S. has had 11 baton errors that have resulted in disqualifications, according to NBC News.

The men’s relay team was considered the favorites to win gold in Paris but started at a disadvantage when Noah Lyles, gold medalist of the men’s 100m earlier in the week, had to be scratched from the event with Covid. His replacement was Christian Coleman. Coleman led off the event, and the baton transfer issue occurred at the end of his stint when Kenny Bednarek, the second stint runner, took off, and Coleman couldn’t catch him. Bednarek almost had to come to a complete stop to take the transfer, and the costly error wound up with the USA crossing the line in seventh place in the event, outside of the medals. The finishing position didn’t matter anyway, as a post-race review revealed the Coleman-Bednarek exchange took place outside the exchange zone, resulting in this team’s disqualification.

The job of a journalist isn’t merely to ask questions. It’s to get answers. It’s to ask those questions during the good and bad times. You can’t just get the smiles and happy tears moments. Doing so would essentially make NBC Sports public relations for Team USA.

So often, in sports journalism, journalists ask questions, and they receive non-answer answers from athletes—statements that don’t really say anything and don’t answer the questions as asked.

This has somewhat trained sports fans to see the act of a post-game/event interview as just a formality. It's a “how was the game?/It was good” moment between media and athletes that does nothing to provide substance to the broadcast we’re watching.

Nobody expects journalists to hold athletes to the same level of questioning they would expect for politicians—though journalists won’t even demand things like basic facts from politicians anymore—but that’s another story for another time. When a question is asked, it’s reasonable for a journalist to want a real, true, authentic answer and, if they don’t get one, to keep pushing for it.

That’s what Johnson did on Friday night.

He opened his interview by asking Coleman what happened during the baton exchange, a valid question viewers should want to know the answer to.

Coleman gave a typical athlete non-answer answer.

“In the heat of the moment, we just didn’t get it done today.”  

OK, we saw that. We know that. The question was, “What happened” to cause that?

Johnson followed up with a more specific question to attempt to pull an actual answer from Coleman. “Why didn’t you catch up to Kenny [Bednarek] there?”

Coleman: “We just didn’t get it done.”

Johnson: “But you have to explain, don’t you, exactly why, after all the practices, that exchange didn’t happen?”

At this point, I truly noticed the interview and realized this was a journalist who did not accept the stereotypical athlete's babble. I literally blurted out from my couch, “Good job, Lewis!”

It’s fair of Johnson to ask because he’s still trying to get to the truth behind the error, but no, an athlete isn’t obligated to answer the question. But to not do so could make them look poorly in the eyes of the viewer – though it should be noted the overwhelming online response was that Coleman and his teammates took the interview admirably and Johnson was “unprofessional” (I’ll get to that in a moment).

Coleman responded: “It just didn’t happen. It wasn’t our day today.”

Johnson continued to ask specific questions. “Did Kenny leave early?”

Coleman: “I think as a team, we just didn’t get it done today.”

And that was the end of the interview because you can only ask so many times before ultimately giving up because, as I said, an athlete isn’t obligated to answer.

I knew immediately that Johnson was going to be hammered online. Journalists are among the most hated professionals in this country – not without some good reasons but also mostly misguided people who don’t understand the profession.

Many don’t realize there’s more to it than asking a question and accepting whatever answer is given.
Many online called Johnson’s interview unprofessional. Many viewed it as him trying to get Coleman to throw his teammate Bednarek “under the bus,” as if a “what happened” question could be wrong. Do we not remember our Five Ws (Who, What, Why, When & Where)?  Some online even called for Johnson to be fired by NBC Sports.  

But this is what actual journalism looks like, and it’s unfortunate that so many sports journalists specifically sit back and accept the non-answer answers they’re so frequently given.