Athletics: Eclipse of Jones complete as Chinese stars rise

By SIMON TURNBULL in Athens

Marion Jones was standing deep in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium, a ruck of American reporters hanging on her every word as she mulled over the one that got away. The ones that got away, make that.

In the space of an hour the one-time superwoman of track and field crashed to Earth in the long-jump pit, then forlornly waved a relay baton that might have been a lump of kryptonite.

In reality, Jones had lost the powers that put her on the medal rostrum five times in Sydney, thrice at the very top, before she even arrived in Athens for her second Olympic Games.

At 28, the Californian is no longer the force that she once was. That much was evident at the US Olympic trials in July. In the midst of the United States Anti-Doping Agency's investigation into her association with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, the fastest woman since the late Florence Griffith-Joyner failed to find sufficient speed to qualify to defend the 100m and 200m titles she won in Sydney.

She did reach the final of the long jump on Friday, but finished 20cm shy of the medal frame, with a best effort of 6.85m.

Then she stepped on to the back straight of the track for the second leg of the 4x100m relay final.

With gold beckoning the US quartet, she took four attempts before getting the baton in the grasp of Lauryn Williams.

It was too late. The gold had gone. Williams had already strayed beyond the limit of her changeover box.

And so to the post-mortem examination. "I have exceeded my wildest dreams in a negative sense," Jones lamented.

"I was looking for great things tonight and they just didn't happen."

It remains to be seen whether Jones has had her day, and whether the anti-doping agency will take any action against her.

In the wider scheme of things, however, the athletics world was turning even as Jones spoke.

Along the corridor, sitting at the top table in the press conference room, Liu Xiang was coming to terms with his new-found status as China's first male Olympic track-and-field champion and joint holder of the 110m hurdles world record.

And, somewhere else in the main stand, Xing Huina was celebrating her victory in the women's 10,000m final.

The US remains the global superpower of track and field, but two golds in the space of 50 minutes are proof that China is finding a Midas touch with the Beijing Games just four years away.

The wave of women's middle-distance and long-distance domination prompted by Ma Junren and his controversial, and questionable, training methods - which yielded a host of untouchable world records and an Olympic 5000m title for Wang Junxia in Atlanta in 1996 - ebbed away virtually as quickly as it had swept in.

In Liu and Xing, though, there is evidence of a longer-term shift in the fortunes of Chinese athletics.

Liu, 21, and Xing, 20, will still be young, in track-and-field terms, in 2008 when they come to defend their Olympic titles on home ground.

- INDEPENDENT