The Summer Olympics: Marion Jones

(2 of 3)

Jones' big week in Sydney will also include the 200-m dash, which she won at the U.S. trials with a time of 21.94 sec., and two four-person relays, the 4 X 100 m and the 4 X 400 m. Jones hasn't competed much at 400m--the way meets are arranged, it's hard to fit in. But her one 400m this year produced the second fastest time in the world. Too bad she doesn't practice. Not that she lacks for activity. If she is to claim gold in all five events, she'll have to run at least 10 races, including qualifying heats, and take as many as nine jumps, in nine days.

The long-jump competition is an entirely different proposition. In Brussels, Jones finished fifth, fouling on four of six attempts. Not only has Jones not dominated this season, she hasn't been especially good at the event. Critics say she simply doesn't know how to jump, and in truth her style on the field is as artless as her form on the track is elegant. She pumps her arms, runs like hell, then jumps; if she fouls, she moves back a step before ignition. Nevertheless, she was the top-ranked women's long jumper in 1998, and with her package--the speed, the will, the sense of destiny--there is, in the back of her mind and everyone else's, the thought that at any moment she could uncork a stratospheric leap.

When Marion was a kid, her toys were sticks and balls, not dolls, and as with Tiger and Andre, there are stories aplenty about Marion the post-toddler prodigy. A feisty little girl, she could outrace any boy in the L.A. burbs. She was special and knew it. At age 5 in 1981, she watched Diana marry Charles on TV and asked about the red carpet. Her mom told her the carpet was rolled out for important people. "Well, when I go places," Marion said, "why don't they roll it out for me?"

Jones did not live a red-carpet childhood. She does not speak to her father, and her relationship with her mother, also named Marion, is delicate. As she describes it, "What happened there was I got injured, and without sports I got depressed. I moved away from my mom emotionally, and in college I drifted further. We still don't have the typical mother-daughter relationship where she's baking me cookies, but we're comfortable. I love her, and she loves me, and we're fine."

Marion's father, once he was divorced from her mother, had no desire to be involved in his daughter's upbringing. In a few particularly painful instances, Marion would head into Los Angeles to seek out her dad at the Laundromat where he worked. She would spot him in his office, then be told he wasn't around. She'd look again, and he'd be gone. When Marion's stepfather Ira Toler died of a stroke in 1987, the 11-year-old was left with no father and no father figure. She has often said that given the chance, "I would have been a daddy's girl," and she sometimes wonders if she won all those trophies to impress a man she never knew. "I've made no further attempts to get in contact with my father since I was maybe 19," she says. "Obviously, he's made no attempts to contact me. It's a nonfactor."