White lightning can strike twice

14 April 2012

When Kelli White talks about “me and Mrs Jones” it is with respect, no great affection and plenty of impatience.

Marion Jones may feel as if she has only loaned out the title of fastest woman on earth while on maternity leave, but her diminutive successor plans to illustrate again in Paris tonight why she’ll have one hell of a job winning it back.

Jones, here doing TV commentary, firmly expects to see her powerpacked 5ft 4in compatriot achieve something that has even eluded her during a stellar career; that is, complete a 100m and 200m double at the World Athletics Championships.
After that, White will aim to ambush Jones’s much anticipated comeback following the birth of her child in a $75,000 (£48,000) showdown in Moscow next month.

“Oh, I’ve years to go and a lot more growing and learning to do to be where she (Jones) is,” said White with typical American PR aplomb, while somehow being unable to hide how fed up she is of being asked about Tim Montgomery’s missus, as she fancies it’s her time now.

Like Jones once did, she is making the others look like selling platers, winning the 100m emphatically on Sunday and, by the look of her strolling 22.50sec semi-final win last night, it’s not a question of whether she’ll win her longer, stronger event tonight but by how far.

Then Jones could be in trouble. At 26, White, squat and muscular, is coming right into her prime and if her coach Remi Korchemny has not yet been able to make Dwain Chambers the consistent master of the art of power allied to relaxation, he seems to have had no problem with his other charge, even if she’s not the greatest starter.

It not only helps that sprinting’s in the genes, with dad Willie a former
10.3sec man and mum Debbie a Jamaican Olympic relay runner, but that White’s also as tough as nails, something revealed by just the faintest trace of a scar which circles her left eye.

Plastic surgery has largely erased the horror of an attack she suffered nine years ago when, waiting at a train station near her home in Union City just outside San Francisco, a maniacal girl assailant launched an unprovoked attack on her with a kitchen knife which almost saw her lose her left eye.

She can joke now about how the doctors “stopped counting” when they’d inserted 300 stitches in the horrific wound. They never caught her attacker and she thought she’d be haunted by the memory for the rest of her life. “Yet, strangely, it helped me grow up,” she recalls. Within a fortnight, she competed again.

This same resilience helped her overcome a painful foot injury which hung around for three years and almost prompted her to quit the sport when it recurred in April. She’s also successfully conquered the demons that Paris holds for her after she gave a positive drugs test at a Grand Prix meeting here last year.

Under French rules, she was banned from competing there for six months after having a cortisone injection to treat her foot. The substance, though, is not on the international banned list and IAAF officials accepted her explanation.

The city now appears to embrace her, even if her moment of 100m glory on Sunday was quite overshadowed by the desperate Jon Drummond lie-down show in the men’s heats. Tonight, nobody in the Stade de France will take their eyes off White since the home heroine, Muriel Hurtis, the European champion, looks set to run her closest after she qualified as fastest in 22.41. She was flat-out, though.

The British highlight last night was Chris Tomlinson’s splendid achievement in not only becoming the first Briton to make a world championship long-jump final but to get there as second best qualifier, with a season’s best 8.16 metres.

The 6ft 6in prospect had been so fed up with his form after an injuryplagued summer that he’d already resigned himself to the consolation of some sightseeing up the Eiffel Tower tomorrow night. Instead, he now harbours hopes of clambering atop a podium.

In the men’s 200m, Darren Campbell and Christian Malcolm believe they will safely negotiate tonight’s semis, though 100m bronze medallist Campbell looks the better bet to make tomorrow’s final.

But this is not the men’s night; it’s the stage for White lightning.

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100m Race

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White lightning can strike twice

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