Mobile Jones

Marion Jones is playing H-O-R-S-E. It's a universally known basketball game, a bit of fun. You make a shot of your choice and then your opponent has to replicate it.

Sky-hooks, lay-ups, anything goes. Loser is horse. It's a game she and CJ played a lot in their driveway on mellow afternoons in North Carolina, before the media meltdown that followed those blurred 10.75 seconds of flashbulbs and sinew in Sydney last September. Before she became known as the fastest woman alive.

She is in London for the World Sports Awards - an accolade that she wins later in the evening - and the afternoon is dedicated to the promotion of Nike, her shoe sponsor. The corporation is launching a new brand, their first global assault since the `Air' phenomenon transformed the swoosh logo into a cultural reference point some 16 years ago.

Maurice Greene is also on duty, along with Thierry Henry of Arsenal, Paula Radcliffe and Lawrence Dallaglio. The draw is that after the questions, media folk get to interact with the stars; keep pace with Maurice on a threadmill, run dexterity drills with Thierry, shoot baskets with Marion.

So some media kid challenges the Olympic champion to a game of horse and she says fine and she demonstrates her mock outrage when it turns out this young guy can actually shoot and can make a game of it.

Her ease is luminous and those around her soon forget they are shooting with a superstar. Jones is natural and masterful when it comes to public duties. The Nike launch involves the new shoes being elevated on five pistons with a starry background and lots of white smoke.

The effects are straight out of Dr Who and to compound the cheesiness, space age doors spilt in two to reveal the waving and slightly sheepish trio of Maurice, Marion and Thierry. But Jones is the leader, taking the podium and cruising through a light and rehearsed question and answer session with her colleagues.

"I'm a journalist major," she says by way of explanation. "I graduated in that in North Carolina and as a matter of fact, I'm looking forward to doing my first live telecast in California at the end of this month. I think that getting my feet wet while I'm still in the sport is going to be interesting and to be at the other side of the mike. All of this is a preparation for what I'll do afterwards. Track and field is not my whole life."

Watch Jones' smooth, arcing shot, her languid familiarity with the ball and its easy to see the ghost of her previous athletic life, to recognise the explosive pointguard that led the North Carolina Tar Heels to a national college championship in 1994.

Back then, she was a hoops star who ran track for pleasure and escape. It is fascinating to wonder about what might have happened to Jones had she not opted for the willowy suburbs of Chapel Hill, had she not met and fallen for the fearsome and authoritative US shot putter who was coaching in the college at the time.

"Easy call," was Hunter's succinct revelation about his choice of Marion over his job.

Whereas Hunter had, since their marriage in 1998, come to be regarded as the sprinter's forbidding bulwark and mentor, it is his sobbing performance in Sydney that will endure. There was an undeniable cruelty to the timing of the announcement that Hunter had tested positive the previous July and athletics' tarnished history was enough to ensure that plenty of withering insinuations were cast at Jones.

Her performance in supporting her husband was nearly as impressive and polished and untouchable as her subsequent feats in winning two more gold and two bronze.

The widely heralded "drive for five" fell short in colour only.

"The situation is the same as the last time I spoke about it," she says when the subject of her husband's positive tests is aired. "CJ is talking with our lawyers and we are finding out more about these allegations each day. We are very excited that in the very near future, important information is going to come to the forefront and a lot of people will realise that all of these positive tests are not realistic and not true."

IT'S probably her standard answer, a candid deflection of a question asked every time she steps out. But there is also the sense that, while she empathises and suffers with her husband on an emotional level, his career difficulties are irrelevant in terms of her own supernova ascent.

Jones is hot property at this moment, delighting Nike and AT&T and TAG Heuer. She is the cover star of the current American Vogue, wearing Donna Karan and shot by Annie Leibovitz. No other athlete has posed for the magazine front in its 110 years history. She is the one molten exception to an Olympics that left America cold and is at the summit of possibility.

"There is so much left to do," she says at various times in the afternoon. "I can break world records. I have yet to be a 200 metre world champion, the long jump world champion. I just turned 25 in October - not even close to perfecting my technique and my strength and obviously (laughing) my long jump. But I'm really excited that I could go to Sydney and win five and not be at the top of my game." If Marion Jones is clear-eyed in her ambition, then she is disarmingly open about it.

Wasn't it always like that? Certain snippets of Jones's childhood have since become crystallised, interpreted as symbolic of her destiny. The little girl who came home from the Olympic ceremony in LA and wrote upon her blackboard "I will be an Olympic champion." Jackie Joyner Kersee was her idol. The youngster nicknamed "Hard Nails" as she ran after Albert Kelly, her halfbrother, beating his friends at sprints.

The constant switching from school to school around California seeking programmes to fit her talent. The heartbreak when Ira Toler, her beloved stepfather, died of a stroke in 1987.

Marion on Good Morning America, age 15, just three years later, as the youngest to compete in an Olympic trial. The stubborn persistence with both track and basketball after she went to North Carolina. And then CJ and the furrowed brows that accompanied their relationship.

Even her mother, Marion Toler, who in a 1998 Sports Illustrated piece, wondered: "A divorced man with two children. Is CJ right for her? I pray that he is. She is in a little girl's world, with her audience and her celebrity and my take is that she is looking for her daddy."

But she also knew nothing would stop her daughter, admitting that: "I knew she would defy me, test me and there were many rebellions. But that I decided that she was special, that I had to find a way to nurture these qualities, not to beat them out of her."

Public redemption came in Sydney when Marion Toler embraced her daughter after the 100 metres final and watched her carry the Belize national flag - her mother's native country - with the Stars and Stripes.

Her girl was special. Her independence and brilliance burned as incandescent as the torch above them. The two-job, dog days of summers past had been worth it.

In April, Jones' season begins again, "as it always does, with a small meet in California." Privately, a part of her wonders if the blaze of hype will cool a little. "Before Sydney, people actually asked me if I take a nine-to-five job between Olympic years," she laughs.

But that was then. Now, people know what she is about. At home, she and her husband are building a new place. They coach a kid's basketball team at weekends, watch some TV, enjoying the normality and living their lives.

On the track, however, her ambition is to leave normality light seconds behind. After Sydney, she found herself restless during the month of complete rest. She yearned for a return to the 8.30 a.m. weights sessions, the daily three-hour track runs.

"I'm back into what I call my element," she says now, "I'm on the track, I'm training."

The quest is more alive than ever. Try keeping up with Ms Jones over the next four years. Try like the rest.