As good as gold: Marion Jones

By PETER JESSUP


Remember Carl Lewis, the brash track and field star who ruled the sprints and the long jump for the best part of a decade? Remember the post Los Angeles Olympics joke that Kiwis, with eight golds, revelled in? "What's the difference between Carl Lewis and Australia? - Nothing, they both got four golds.

Well, think smaller and female and five golds and you've got Marion Jones.

Aged 24, fresh-faced, hugely talented, confident and outspoken, Jones is going to Sydney with the goal of returning home to North Carolina with five gold medals.

She has qualified for the United States track team in the 100m, 200m, 4x400m, the long jump, and is sure to be on the 4x100m relay team.

She has enjoyed spectacular success and seen equally spectacular failure since her emergence on the international scene in 1998, but recent form suggests her legs will carry her where her mouth has predicted.

Jones has not been beaten over the 100m since 1997. She was unbeaten in 37 starts at all three events until German Heike Dreschler took the long jump at a World Cup event in Johannesburg in 1998. Jones recorded the second-fastest female 100m of all time (10.65s) at that meet in the cold of Johannesburg. She wants to beat Florence Griffith Joyner's world records of 10.49s for the 100m and 21.34s for the 200m. Jones also reckons she can get 7.5m in the jump, closing in on the 7.52m world record held by Russian Galina Chistyakova.

"Records mean a lot in the back of my mind but that's not my goal when I step on the track," she says. "It would be great for the records to fall but I'm not going to say that's going to happen."

Not yet, anyway.

Jones was brought up in Los Angeles, her parents having immigrated from Belize in Central America. At age 9 she wrote on her bedroom blackboard that she was going to be an Olympic champion like her hero, Griffith Joyner. By age 16 the prodigious sprinting talent in her genes was showing out all over. She won every sprint at the state championships four years running. But, despite her being only 1.76m tall, it was basketball that gave her a start at a career in sport. She won a scholarship to the University of North Carolina and played point guard in a National College Athletic Association championship title win, averaging 28 points for the season.

At the end of 1997 she returned to the track, won the sprints and beat national champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee in the long jump. As she was taking her medals on the victory dais a fan yelled out that she should quit basketball and get back to track and field. "You obviously haven't seen me play basketball," she shouted back.

That kind of confidence has sparked accusations of arrogance from competitors. Europe's best women's sprinter, Christine Arron of France, alleges Jones has a nasty lack of respect for rivals and is "cold, distant and pretentious."
That's certainly not her image in the United States, where big corporates line up to cash in on the nation's four-yearly love affair with track and field. Jones has milked millions from sponsorships including Nike. Her studies in journalism and communication at North Carolina make her a natural on the box, and a commentating career is a certainty once the athletics is over. Her mile-wide smile gleams "product endorsement" in white neon, the "I'm a winner" attitude just fine by States standards.

Looming over her is failure at the world championships in Seville last year, where she had predicted four golds and went home with one - in the 100m - and a bronze in long jump. The dream was shattered when she crashed to the track 50m from the end of the 200m. Her back was in spasm and the injury put her out for months. But that 100m was one of the fastest-ever women's races. She recorded 10.7s and six of the competitors also went under 11s.

Also casting a shadow over her Sydney gold-medal goal is doubt over her long-jump technique. She has the speed to launch, as Lewis did, but lacks the necessary rhythm, and looks as ungainly in the air as a seagull blown sideways by a gust of wind.

"I believe I have the ability to jump over 25 feet before my career is over," she says. "[The doubters] are irrelevant to us. There will always be people who doubt you and your abilities so you just have to use that as motivation and prove them wrong."

Jones' sprint coach is former Jamaican Olympian Trevor Graham. Joyner-Kersee has been watching her jump style at recent US meets and advising her on gathering in the centimetres she'll need to top Sydney favourites Dreschler, Fiona May of Italy and Russian Lyudmila Galkina. Always in the background - albeit always filling it - is champion shot putter C.J. Hunter. The pair have been partners for several years and married at the end of 1998. Jones lists her favourite past-times as being with C.J. and their two dogs, and listening to R'n'B, jazz or reggae.

While others are stirred up by Jones, she remains not aloof but apart from their reaction. That in itself stirs them up more. When fellow US sprinter Inger Miller said she would win three golds in Sydney, including the 100m, Jones' response was: "I think that's wonderful. It wouldn't be nearly as exciting if they came out there expecting second. I expect each of them to think they're going to win it."

But another line - "It's important for everyone to understand the role of competitors" - looked decidedly like a slap back. Could she mean that the others are there to push her on to golden glory?