The last vestiges of Marion Jones’s anonymity are about to be shredded, as this month NBC presents Marion Jones, Superwoman. Track and field has always been the Olympic centerpiece. But past heroes like Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee have now retired, and more recent stars like Michael Johnson and Gail Devers are pursuing lesser goals than in previous Games. Thus Jones, the world’s fastest woman and one with even more superlative Olympic ambitions, has been cast as America’s singular sensation in Sydney.
Jones has set her sights on a feat never before accomplished by a woman: to win four gold medals in the same events (100-meter dash, 200-meter, long jump and 4 x 100-meter relay) that brought Olympic glory to Lewis and Jesse Owens. Then, on the Games’ final weekend, she hopes to outshine even those legendary athletes by winning a fifth gold in the 4 x 400 relay. “I have a chance to achieve something nobody has ever done before,” says Jones, who is a taut 5 feet 9 inches and 150 pounds. “It’s going to really test my mind, my body and my spirit, but I know in my heart I can do it.”
Since missing the Atlanta Games with a foot injury, Jones has become the dominant female track star in the world. At 24, she has what Nike hypes as “the total package”: dazzling looks, a megawatt smile, obvious smarts, an easy patter and a down-to-earth style. “She can talk easily with Nelson Mandela, then 10 seconds later be chatting with a little girl about a doll,” trumpets Nike’s Dave Mingey. “We don’t find too many athletes who can do that.” And that’s not even mentioning that Jones, as a freshman point guard, led the University of North Carolina to an NCAA basketball title and hopes someday to play in the WNBA.
It is an embarrassment of riches, and–with Marion slated for at least 12 rounds of running and jumping on six different days–NBC plans to mine it to the max. She has already faced some grumbling about her outsize share of the spotlight, as well as for the decidedly matter-of-fact way she discusses her lofty goals. “Jealousy,” says her agent, Charley Wells. “Nothing but simple jealousy.” Jones is far less pointed. “Everyone is trying to make this a little more deep than it is,” says Jones, who is the first runner to seriously threaten the late Florence Griffith Joyner’s pair of 1988 world records in the 100 and 200. “I love to win, hate finishing second. So my goal is always to win every event I compete in. But this thing has just snowballed. I’m tired of hearing myself say it.”
But Jones has told herself she was destined for greatness ever since she was a child. She grew up in the Los Angeles area with her mother, a native of Belize who was a legal secretary, and her stepfather, who died when she was 11. (Her father left home when Marion was a small child.) During the ‘84 Olympics in L.A., Jones, at the age of 8, printed neatly on the blackboard in her bedroom: “I’m going to be an Olympic champion in 1992.” “That’s how we were raised,” says her half brother Albert Kelly. “Anything you wanted in life, you wrote it down. You thought about it, you believed it and then went out and got the things you needed to accomplish it. Everything is obtainable!”
Jones’s running prowess was already evident. She had begun chasing Albert, who is five years older, around the neighborhood when she was just 5 years old. It took not only speed, but perseverance–what Jones calls “my outrageous competitive nature”–to keep up with her brother and his pals, who were anxious to dump the pesky kid. Finally, they gave up and included her in their sports contests. “We’d have races and she was always right behind me, beating all my friends,” he says. “By the time she was 13, she was beating me too. There didn’t seem to be anything she couldn’t do. We had this neighbor who’d done years of gymnastics. One day Marion said, ‘Show me what you’re doing.’ Next second Marion is doing handsprings, backflips, doing it all. We were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ "
After the boys, racing against girls her own age “was nothing,” she says. She began entering competitions at the age of 10, and won everything. “That’s when I began to say, ‘I think I have something very special’.” Even the childish prediction of a ‘92 gold medal didn’t seem outlandish when, at 16, she reached that year’s Olympic trials and qualified as an alternate on the 4 x 100 relay team for Barcelona. But Jones was convinced that the coach would never entrust the baton to a teen, even in preliminary rounds. She declined the spot and, as it turned out, what could have been her first Olympic gold. “It wouldn’t have meant anything to me because I wouldn’t have felt I earned it,” she says. “I want my first gold medal to be one I sweated for.”
When she entered North Carolina, after winning nine California high-school championships in track and field, she opted to double up and pursue her other sports passion, basketball. The track establishment was appalled, convinced she was jeopardizing her Olympic prospects. “I was in a rebellious phase,” she says. “Nobody was going to tell me I couldn’t play basketball and run track at the same time.” But two fractured feet in two years, the second while training with the U.S. basketball team for the World University Games, cost her a shot at the Atlanta Olympics. “I told Marion it was OK because she would have been just another runner in Atlanta,” says her coach. “And if Marion can’t win, Marion ain’t going. She’s never been in anyone’s shadow in her life.”
There have been other stumbles along the way. At last year’s World Championships in Seville, Spain, Jones planned a trial run at four gold medals. She breezed in the 100, an event she hasn’t lost since 1997, but she staggered to a bronze in the long jump, her weakest and most inconsistent event. On the morning of the 200 final, Jones woke up with nagging pains in her back, but never seriously considered withdrawing from the race. Midway through the curve, back spasms sent her crashing to the track, ending her meet and sidelining her for almost two months. “For a brief moment I really feared for the future,” she says. “And for a long time I had a real hard time dealing. Just ask Mr. Hunter [her husband, world-champ shot-putter C. J. Hunter]. He had to take the brunt of it.”
Jones and her husband skipped out of Spain without so much as a goodbye and cloistered themselves from public view. Jones’s considerable charm can, at times, get lost in the shadow of Hunter, a scowling, 330-pounder who makes no secret of his distaste for the press and its intrusive inquiries. “I’m a little laid back, but I have the luxury of having my husband with me,” she says. “He’s watching my back.” The press in Europe, where track and field thrives during the three non-Olympic years, have dubbed the couple “Beauty and the Beast.”
Once when they were headed off on vacation, a reporter asked why they needed to “get away” from the sport they love. “We don’t need to get away from it,” replied Hunter, who is himself a gold-medal contender in Sydney. “We need to get away from you.” Jones says, “C.J. is not as rough around the edges with me as he is with others.” The two are as different as their two dogs, the chow Izzy and the mastiff Paulie. But they complement each other nicely; they even survived coaching a girl’s basketball team together. “C.J. has a soft side–he cries at movies,” Jones says. “And he has a very quirky way of looking at things. He always makes me laugh and forget all the problems in the world.”
By last October Jones was her sunny self again–back on the track in Raleigh, N.C., pounding through the tough daily regimen prescribed by her coach, Trevor Graham. “Faster,” the coach yells, barely glancing up from the football videogame he is playing with Hunter. “Because Marion is a superior athlete, folks don’t realize how hard she works,” says Graham, a former running star from Jamaica. “That girl puts in her time. I come up with these workouts that I think will really give her difficulty. She just goes out and does it, then masters it. The reason she runs so fast is that she’s scientifically and mechanically sound.”
And driven. Her coach needs only to make the vaguest reference to last year’s disappointment at the World Championships to push Jones to work harder and longer. He is less successful, though, at getting her to dial back and, on occasion, even take a break. “In the back of my mind,” she says, “I always feel somebody is out there training while I’m home watching ‘Jerry Springer’.”
Still, Jones looked extraordinarily relaxed at the Olympic trials. In both the 100- and 200-meter finals, she blew away her putative rival, Inger Miller, who had won the 200-meter world title last year after Marion’s spill. The only moment of high drama came in the long jump, an event in which Jones’s flawed technique is compensated by her natural speed and athleticism. “I never jumped until my senior year in high school,” Jones says. “The school had a makeshift pit, and my very first jump I went 19 feet, 10 inches–out beyond the pit.” In recent years, as she has learned more about jumping, Jones has struggled, particularly with her takeoff. In the trials final, Jones fouled on her first two jumps. A third foul or a short jump would have bounced her from the competition. “If you’re going to be the best in the world, you can’t be worried about what’s happening,” says Jackie Joyner-Kersee, a three-time Olympic medalist in the long jump. “[Marion and I] were standing there talking, and I didn’t detect any concern at all. She knew she was going to get that jump.” Jones’s third leap kept her in the competition, and two jumps later she soared 23 feet and one-half inch to win the gold.
Will Jones rise to the occasion again? “Sydney is perfect because she is set up as the big star,” says Graham, her coach. But Jones is also set up for what could be a colossal letdown. She not only has to excel, but must count on her relay teammates to come through as well. And she must do it all during her first experience with the unparalleled pressure of Olympic competition. “It’s impossible to fully prepare for,” says Michael Johnson, who pulled off his historic 200-400 double-gold in Atlanta in his second Olympic go-round. “You never know what’s going to happen or what to expect. She’ll probably figure out daily how difficult it really is. But that doesn’t mean she won’t be successful.”
Jones knows she is just a rookie and won’t pretend otherwise. She plans to march in the opening ceremonies, videocam in hand. Then, Marion says, she will deal with whatever comes, including disappointment. But she doesn’t expect any. “I’m going to run fast and jump far,” she says. “All my preparation is pointed at that moment on Oct. 1 when the Games are over and I have the satisfaction of having won all I’ve entered.” If so, Jones’s feats will surely be celebrated as the pinnacle of Olympic glory.
