Queen awaits coronation

On the searing hot day on which the US Olympic Trials ended in Sacramento this summer Inger Miller came to the press tent along with Marion Jones. Miller had talked a good race all week. And Miller had been comprehensively beaten all week. Now, as the second-placed qualifier in the 200 metres, she would again share the rostrum with Jones.

Miller sought to diminish the humiliation by aggressively running the press conference. Journalists were a little embarrassed for Miller. Jones was the star and the show. But Miller kept talking.

What fascinated was the cold stoniness of Jones' stare as she studied the white, billowing walls of the tent. For 20 minutes Jones declined to look at, laugh with, or even say the name of her nearest rival.

For Miller, it was the same old trouble she's known since teenage days. She grew up a year or so ahead of Jones in the Californian sunshine. Miller was a prodigy. Jones was better. On Friday, the Olympics start. Jones is on the cover of Time, Newsweek and just about every sports magazine available. She has laid siege to the American imagination. And Inger Miller?

Inger who? Miller is the best measure of Marion Jones' astonishing success. While Jones attempts the stunningly audacious "drive for five" over the next couple of weeks, Miller will be along for the ride, fishing for silver. She doesn't even pretend anymore that she's a contender.

Miller and Jones first met on St Patrick's Day 10 years ago at a schools track meet. They competed in a 100 metre race which Miller won handily, running 11.48, which was .38 seconds faster than Jones. Miller didn't know what lay ahead. Jones obsessed about Miller from there on. Three weeks later the margin was down to .02 seconds.

By the following spring and summer Jones had blossomed as a full-blown phenomenon. She broke US schools records on a weekly basis until, at 15, she ranked fourth in the US at both the 100m and 200m. Fourth at senior national level that is. She qualified for the 1992 Olympic Games as a sub on the 400m relay squad. She decided not to go to Barcelona.

The previous year there had even been debate as to whether Jones would run for America at all. Through her mother, she has dual citizenship with Belize and in her mid-teens toyed with the idea of running for Belize. In the end she opted for America and a star-spangled Nike contract.

"Marion has always been aggressive, right from day one she took charge. She took all the decisions," says Marion Toler, Jones' mother. Jones would dispute that last part and would claim that if she is aggressive she didn't pick it up from the stones. She was pushed heavily by her mother, who even moved her out of a specially-chosen school after she came to resent the coaches' influence over her daughter. Jones was just a kid but the news of the shift made the Los Angeles Times.

Jones' parents were divorced when she was an infant. Toler knew within a few years that her daughter was a unique talent. By the ninth grade she was able to jump high enough to touch the rim of the family basketball hoop 10 feet off the ground.

Jones was eight when she scribbled on the wall of her bedroom "I will be an Olympic Champion". Nobody ever told her otherwise. Her father, George Jones, left when Marion was two. He has stayed gone despite Jones' attempts to make contact. Her stepfather, Ira Toler, died when she was 12. Sport and Marion Toler filled all the gaps.

In her teens Jones once received a four-year ban from US track and field for missing a drug test. They eventually binned the incident after an enraged Toler had attacked them for sending the letter to the wrong person.

Today the relationship between Toler and her daughter is brittle. Toler followed her daughter to North Carolina, where Jones abandoned the track to play on the university's successful basketball team. Jones has pushed hard for her independence. Many see a combination of needs in her early marriage to the US shot putter CJ Hunter, whom she met at North Carolina.

Not that anybody is going to ask about that. Hunter is gruff and big (almost 23 stone), divorced with two kids and a wife who had to sue to get child support. Last summer, when a reporter asked Jones if her mother had disapproved of her marriage, Hunter took the reporter aside and told him, nose to nose: "You are a fucking idiot."

As far as anyone can see that primal protectiveness defines the relationship. In Sacramento the couple gave a one-off joint press conference which would have been comedic had anyone dared laugh.

Hunter, who looked as though he had chosen the option of a press conference in a narrow decision over root canal treatment without an anaesthetic, sat brooding like a mountain and contributed a number of syllables in single figures. Jones spoke freely about her husband's sense of fun, his romantic nature, etc. Everyone nodded earnestly as if she were merely stating the obvious.

Yet something about the couple has caught the imagination of the American public. Her stunningly audacious decision to go for five gold medals in Sydney and to announce the fact a year beforehand goes down as one of the greatest acts of hubris in sport. The risk is huge in marketing terms. Three golds from Sydney would be an amazing accomplishment but would be judged as failure in America.

Jones is unabashed. "I genuinely believe I can do it. I genuinely feel that it is a question of who comes second." Nobody has won five golds at athletics in one Olympics since 1924. By setting out to do so, Jones has made herself the goddess of the Games before they begin.

Jones' presence and the pressure which bears down on her was the main reason that 170,000 spectators and 1,000 journalists turned up in Sacramento. Just in case something blew like it did in Seville last year when Jones left the World Championships on a stretcher.

Sacramento went smoothly and Jones subsequently breezed through Europe with ease. All the time her stock rises. She has made sassy ads for television and is a competent performer on the talk-show circuit.

Pressure?

"Just bring it on, bring it on," says her coach Trevor Graham. "After Sydney and the drive for five life is just beginning. We're going for 13 medals. We'll go for five again in Athens and then in 2008 we'll ease off. Only three in 2008."

Back in Sacramento, the Inger Miller show was winding down. Somebody asked Jones the question about anything less than five golds being a failure. "If I had a penny for every time I've been asked `what if I lose' I'd be very very rich," sighed Jones.

"You already are," said Miller in exasperation.

Even Marion Jones had to crack her goofy smile. About 200 camera shutters clicked as she did so. The noise told Inger Miller all she needed to know.