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Sport by Sport: Track & Field
About Track & Field
Sunday, September 10, 2000
Five golds on the way for Marion Jones?
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By Steve Kelley
Seattle Times staff columnist
This month belongs to Marion Jones. Her quest for five Olympic gold medals will be followed day-by-day like Lance Armstrong's ride in the Tour de France.
Every day, every jump, every heat, every crouch into the blocks, every pass of the baton will be evaluated and analyzed and synthesized like some newly discovered planet.
Her health, both physical and mental, will be monitored as intensely as the president's.
This month, Marion Jones is going after five gold medals. She is turning up the heat on her competitive fires. She is pushing her body to its absolute limit.
Five gold medals. Gold in the 100 and 200. Gold in the long jump. And gold in the 400- and 1,600-meter relays.
This is Babe Didrickson plus Althea Gibson, plus Jackie Joyner-Kersee, plus Wonder Woman. It is as if Jones wants to compact every great Olympic performance and take it one step beyond.
"I've always said it's not going to be easy in Sydney," Jones, 24, said after the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. "I'd be the first to tell you it's going to be quite difficult. But the fact that I can come here and get through all of these is motivating to me."
Her Olympics will consist of three heats of the 100, three heats of the 200, two days of the long jump, maybe one heat in each of the relays, and two relay finals.
"When we originally considered doing this, we weren't thinking about history," Jones said.
She won't have to think about it. She'll be making it.
This is the kind of daunting challenge few athletes ever consider. Carl Lewis won four gold medals in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
But Lewis was considered a better long jumper than sprinter. He was a four-time gold medalist in the event. His technique practically was flawless. His takeoffs and landings were perfect. He didn't put extra strain, extra torque on his body.
Jones is far from flawless as a long jumper. She came late to the game, and many of her takeoffs and landings are awkward and put her body and her dreams at risk.
It is that quest, the long jump, that jeopardize this five-peat. And it is her pursuit of the long-jump gold that will be the most compelling.
"Right now it's a crapshoot with Marion," said Mike Powell, the long-jump record-holder whose offers to help her with her form have been turned down politely by Jones. "Carl did not have to worry about the long jump. With Marion it's, 'Am I going to qualify for the final or win the gold medal?' "
Jones' jumping form is dissected in the same way Shaquille O'Neal's free-throw shooting is. Suggestions are faxed and mailed and telephoned to her the same way a hitter is deluged during a batting slump.
She gets relaxation tips to overcome the tenseness that sometimes hits her face and arms as she sprints down the runway.
She is given tips on her takeoff. She knows her final steps to the board often get short and choppy. The advice she's gotten to correct those flaws could fill a book the size of a Norman Mailer novel.
Still, out of faith and loyalty, the only coach she listens to, the one she gives all of her faith to, is Trevor Graham.
"Of course, I'll be the first one to tell you my long jump needs work," she says. "My specialty is running."
As flawed as her technique is, she still is the best in this country. She finished third (Spain's Niurka Montalvo won) at last year's World Championships in Seville, and she is one of the favorites for the gold in Sydney.
But it isn't just the competition that makes the long jump her most frightening event. It also is the strain the jumping and landing place on her knees, hips, hamstrings and especially her back.
Her back began to tighten after the long jump in Seville. The pain was massaged and acupunctured and chiropraticked, but nothing made the pain and the gnawing spasms disappear.
And in the second heat of the 200, on the extra-hard track in Seville, around the curve where the torque on her back is the most severe, her back began to spasm.
After fighting it for several strides, Jones finally collapsed in a frightening sight, rolling into another lane, her right hand only slightly cushioning her fall.
"Maybe it was just a way of my body saying, 'You've pushed me long enough, and it's time for you to rest,' " she said after the race. "It just happened at the worse possible time."
When she returned to her home in Chapel Hill, N.C., an MRI revealed a genetic condition that put a strain on her spine that affected the left side of her back. A new set of exercises to strengthen her stomach, back, glutes and hamstrings was prescribed.
Did the exercises work?
Jones ran pain-free at the U.S. Trials in Sacramento and won the 100, 200 and long jump. She ran the fastest 200 in the world this year -- 21.94 seconds -- at the Trials. And last month she ran the fastest 100 -- 10.78 -- at the British Grand Prix.
And yet, there is something even more impressive about Jones. Something that transcends all the numbers and the goals and on-the-track expectations.
In a sport where the talk is as fast as the walk, Jones is quiet.
When she fell in Seville and Inger Miller won the gold medal, Miller said she would have won even if Jones had been there.
Jones said nothing.
Before the Trials, when she was asked about Jones' five-medal chase in Sydney, Miller said, "It's not going to be the Marion Jones Show."
Jones said nothing.
When Maurice Green and Michael Johnson were doing their pre-200 taunt-fest, Jones refused to get dragged into it.
"You never hear me say a bad word about anybody," she said before her scorching 200 in Sacramento on the same day Johnson and Greene hobbled off the track with hamstring cramps. "What I want to do is run fast. I'm tired of all this talking.
"If you're going to talk, put up. Come to the track and be ready to run. That's all I ask."
The smart money says Jones will win all of her races. She will leave Sydney with four golds in the sprints and some other medal -- maybe bronze -- in the long jump.
But just as important, she will light up the Sydney sky. She is smart, vivacious and obviously appreciative of her good fortune.
Her laugh is infectious and real. When she won the 100 in Sacramento, assuring she was going to her first Olympics, she was genuinely thrilled.
Craig Masback, CEO of USA Track and Field, once told USA Today that Jones "has the chance to be the first female international athlete to transcend sports."
Former Olympic sprinter John Carlos calls her, "A gift from God to the sport."
"I'm very confident," Jones says. "I just want to go out there and run fast. I just like to go out there and have some fun."
Fun? It should be a blast.
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