Mark Lewis-Francis
British sprint athlete and bobsledder
Mark Anthony Lewis-Francis, MBE (born 4 September 1982) is a retired British track and field athlete, specifically a sprinter, who specialised in the 100 metres and was an accomplished regular of GB 4 × 100 m relay. A renowned junior, his greatest sporting achievement at senior level has been to anchor the Great Britain and Northern Ireland 4 × 100 metres relay team to a gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics. Individually, Lewis-Francis has won the silver medal in the 100 m at the 2010 European Athletics Championships and silver medal in the 2010 Commonwealth Games, men's 100 m final.
Career
Lewis-Francis, a member of the Birchfield Harriers athletics club and known as the "Darlaston Dart", burst onto the scene at an early age but did not attend the 2000 Summer Olympics, instead competing at the World Junior Championships, in which he won gold. In 2001 Lewis-Francis won a World Athletics Championships 100 m quarter-final heat in 9.97 seconds, which would have been a junior world record, but a wind gauge malfunction meant it was unratifiable.
Lewis-Francis became the British 100 metres champion after winning the British AAA Championships title at the 2002 AAA Championships and became Britain's top 100 m sprinter after Dwain Chambers was banned for drug use in 2003.
At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, he represented Great Britain and missed out on the final of the 100 m at the 2004 Summer Olympics, but days later ran the final leg of the 4 × 100 m relay, famously holding off former Olympic champion and world record holder Maurice Greene, allowing the Great Britain team to narrowly win in a time of 38.07 seconds. The gold medal team consisted of Lewis-Francis, Marlon Devonish, Darren Campbell and Jason Gardener. As the last of the four in both race and alphabetical order, Lewis-Francis became the fiftieth man to win a gold medal for Great Britain in Athletics at the Olympics.
He left his home town of Birmingham in 2005 to move to Eton and train with a new coach.
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