Any athlete will tell you how important focus is to succeeding. For Lex Gillette, anything less than absolute concentration all but guarantees failure.
Gillette has been one of the best blind long jumpers in the world for more than a decade, winning silver in the event at the last three Paralympics. That’s a testament to his work ethic, athleticism and drive, but it also speaks to his ability to zero in on a single person in a stadium full of people as he prepares to make his jump.
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When Gillette lines up his jump, he stands about 110 feet from the takeoff board, where his guide Wes Williams awaits. Williams claps his hands rhythmically as Gillette accelerates down the 4-foot-wide path, following the sound. It takes 16 long strides for the 6-1 Gillette to cover the distance, and as he lands the final one on the takeoff board, Williams shouts, “Fly! Fly! Fly!”
“It’s like I’m on an island,” Gillette said of the process. “If I can’t hear him, it seems devastating, because if I can’t hear, I can’t see. So making sure that he’s loud, making sure that he’s the only person I need to focus on in that stadium — no one in the crowd, no one to the right of me, to the left of me — listening to him and running at him as fast as possible and making sure I have a good run and great technique and being able to get out there and jump really far.”
Few can fly farther than the 31-year-old Gillette, who holds the world record in the T11 class with a leap of 22 feet, 1 inch. He is the only totally blind athlete to have cleared 22 feet, and his 2016 season best of 21-11 is nearly a foot better than his next-closest competitor.
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It’s a remarkable resume for a guy who only reluctantly took up track and field in high school, only to find a calling that would become a career.
Gillette grew up in Raleigh, N.C., doing all the things a little boy does: riding bikes with his friends, playing video games — just generally being an 8-year-old. But one day as he was getting ready for bed, he noticed he was having trouble seeing. He told his mother, Verdina, and she washed his eyes out with water, thinking something might have gotten into them when he was playing outside.
When he woke up the next morning, nothing had changed, so his mother took him to the doctor. Lex was diagnosed with detached retinas and underwent emergency surgery, which fixed the problem for three or four weeks before a relapse. Another surgery, another three or four weeks, and his vision faded again. Lex ultimately underwent 10 procedures before doctors decided there was nothing else they could do.
“I would go to sleep and wake up the next day and see a little less than I did the day before,” he said, “until one day I woke up and I couldn’t see anything anymore.”
Gillette now considers it a “blessing” that he lost his sight so early in life as opposed to others who have undergone the same transition as an adult. He has been able to construct a life around what he can do rather than dwelling on what he can’t, as crystallized in the motto that drives him: There’s no need for sight when you have vision.
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Gillette first figured out he might have a future as an athlete when he was a senior in high school. He entered the Wake County meet and finished seventh in the long jump as the only blind athlete in the field. The next year, he competed in the 2004 Paralympics in Athens and took silver, solidifying a path he still follows today.
After Gillette graduated from East Carolina University with a sports management degree in 2007, he again won silver at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing before moving to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., to train full time.
“That’s when it really felt like, OK, this is a job, this is something that I’m able to devote all of my time to and really focus on it and sharpen that craft,” he said. “After that, it’s just been an occupation.”
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Crucial to that sequence is the partnership with Williams, which began in 2007. In nine years of traveling the world and competing, the two have become “like brothers,” hanging out away from the track and enjoying shared interests like shopping and music.
That bond means everything to Gillette, given his reliance on Williams to literally keep him in line at the most critical moments. It’s an intricate operation honed in countless hours of practice, just the two of them working to establish a connection that has to be strong enough to overcome the chaotic environment of a high-level international meet.
Despite all of the effort put in, the routine doesn’t always go as planned, as Gillette was reminded at last year’s World Championships in Doha, Qatar. As Gillette began his run-up on the fourth of his six attempts, he was off line to the left. Sensing that, he veered to the right, overcorrecting to the point that he took off several inches to the right of the board and ended up landing on the track surface just outside the sand landing pit.
“I knew I had one of two things I could do: I could either abort mission and not jump, or I could ride it out, land it, and see what happens — because I wasn’t totally sure I would land inside of the pit,” Gillette said. “But I’m at World Championships, I’m going to go for it.”
After his painful landing, Gillette’s first priority was to make sure Williams was OK — that his guide still trusted him.
“So the very next jump, got back out there on the runway, he started calling me, I ran straight, and had my best jump of the competition.”
That leap of 20 feet, 11 1/4 inches was enough to secure a gold medal.
“I loved that moment because, as an athlete, you learn so much about yourself,” Gillette said. “That was a really resilient moment, I felt like, for me, just being able to bounce back, and we were able to stand at the top of the podium and hear that national anthem.”
It’s an experience Gillette has had at every major competition except the Paralympics. When he competes in Rio on Thursday, he will be zeroed in squarely on Williams — and gold.
