It's a sunny lunch hour the day after Halloween in the middle of a typically
crowded Times Square, and Marion Jones, the winner of five Olympic medals
and the fastest woman alive, is posing for a publicity photo with the
fastest man on wheels, Gil de Ferran, the CART-racing champion of the world.
The whole thing has taken maybe three minutes, and then suddenly, all hell
breaks loose.
"Whassup, Marion! Whassup!" a guy with an Italian accent is shouting out the
window of a taxi that has stopped dead in traffic. Two guys unloading a van
start jumping up and down and running in place, going crazy: "Marion Jones!
Oh! Oh! Marion Jones is in the house! Marion!"
She is track star as pop star, a development that has made all of her
sponsors-from AT&T and TAG Heuer to Nike-extremely happy. "To us, she
represents the total package," says Nike communications manager Dave Mingey.
"She can talk easily with Nelson Mandela, then 10 seconds later chat with a
little girl about a doll."
She's not a glamour girl in the mode of the late, great Flo-Jo; Jones'
appeal lies in her awesome self-possession. Favoring "dark colors," she wore
a brown suede shirt, loose beige reptile slacks, brown oxfords and a black
jacket from the J.Jill catalog for Rosie O'Donnell; for Dave Letterman, she
had donned a gray flannel skirt. Her flash-in the form of shimmering
chrome-paneled Nikes-as well as her fierceness is reserved for the track.
Jones can run very, very fast. In October, at 24, Jones became the first
woman in track-and-field history to win five medals-three golds and two
bronzes-at a single Olympic Games. She ran the 100 meters in 10.75 seconds,
the fastest time of any woman in history except Flo-Jo. Jones won the 100 by
the largest margin since 1952, and the 200 by the largest margin (13 feet)
since 1960-feats that required not double- but triple-page magazine spreads
to show the stunning gap between her and the other runners. When she ran the
third leg of the 4-by-400 relay, her competitors did not even try to stay
with her. "I knew if I went out that fast, I would die at the end," said
Jamaica's Deon Hemmings. "All I saw," said Great Britain's Allison
Curbishley, "was the back of her head."
Jones has known she would get to this moment for a long time, and there has
never been any question of whether she would be up to it. In 1984, when
Jones was 8 and the Olympics were in her hometown of Los Angeles, she
returned from the opening ceremony with her family, went to her room, and
wrote on her blackboard, "I WILL BE AN OLYMPIC CHAMPION." Not long
afterward, she watched Jackie Joyner-Kersee on TV and thought, Gosh, she
looks like me, a woman and an athlete who loves what she does. I wanted to
be like her.
What makes Jones the achiever she is, she says, is 50 percent talent and 50
percent just wanting it so badly. "I'm very motivated," she says. "I'm a
sore loser. Therefore I train harder than I think anybody else in the world
in my sport."
She is amused when people ask her how it feels "truly, truly down in your
soul when you're running." She flashes the deceptively girlish grin. "I tell
them that you know, we go over technique so much in practice that when you
get out there it just happens automatically. You're not really thinking
about anything." Except, she says, one thing: "I want to be the first one to
that line."
Jones is slowly getting conditioned again for 2004, where she'll try to meet
the goals she set so long ago. Prior to the last Olympics, she said, "Before
my career is over, I will attempt to run faster than any woman has ever run
and jump farther than any woman has ever jumped." She wants to win her five
golds; she wants to eclipse Flo-Jo and Joyner-Kersee in the record books;
she wants the option of going on to a glorious career in the WNBA. She wants
nothing less than to be included, she says, in the same sentence as Ali or
Jordan. There are few who don't believe that will happen. "I'll say this,"
says Dennis Craddock, who coached Jones in track at UNC. "You don't put
limits on what Marion Jones can do. In anything. Period."
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