Baton botch

Missed handoff reminiscent of men's team's failure in Seoul

You could almost hear the words from across the stadium: "Safe passes. Safe. Safe. Safe."

Take the baton from your teammate before you do anything else. Don't pass go. Don't run before tying your shoes. Don't open the door until the car stops. With the four runners the U.S. had on its 4x100-meter relay team Friday night, a gold medal was a near certainty -- as long as it made three safe and clean passes. On Thursday, the quartet of Angela Williams, Marion Jones, Lauryn Williams and LaTasha Colander had gotten the baton around smoothly and finished its semifinal heat in 41.67 seconds. No other team in their heat broke 43 seconds. That 41.67 was a stroll, too. Angela Williams, Jones and Lauryn Williams each slowed before making the handoff. They might have done the same in the final and won. But on the team's second exchange, Jones never quite caught up to Lauryn Williams. She tried, yelling, "Wait up. Wait up." But by the time Jones, flailing the baton, reached Williams, flailing an open hand, it didn't matter that Jones was stumbling to stay afoot; Williams had already run out of the acceptable passing zone. Jamaica finished first in 41.73, a time that was slower than what the U.S. team ran in the semis.

It was the end of a miserable evening for Jones, the five-time Olympic medalist in Sydney, who said then that she felt she was looking at the track world from atop Mt. Olympus. Now she stands 0-for-Athens. "It was an extremely disappointing performance for me," she said. "It exceeded my wildest dreams in a negative sense."

A gold in the relay for Jones would have been a ray of sunshine in a hopelessly dark year. Her reputation has been smeared by drug accusations and her performances have been way off those that once made her the top runner of her generation. Her six long jumps in a fifth-place effort 30 minutes earlier might have taken something out of her legs. U.S. teams don't usually practice handoffs as often as other teams, relying instead on the sum totals of their speed. That wasn't necessarily the case in Athens, since Jones simply couldn't catch up. The pass might have been secure, if only Jones had been able to keep her speed.

U.S. foursomes have never swept the four relays at either a world championship or an unboycotted Olympics, even though they often have the best runners entering the races. Carl Lewis might have ten gold medals, except for a botch at the 1988 Games in Seoul. That day, the U.S. 4x100 men whiffed in the opening round when Lee McNeil left too fast for Calvin Smith to hand him the baton before he ran out of the zone. That was an opening round, mind you, against subpar runners that could have hailed from an inlet off the coast of Greenland. At least Jones didn't mouth off against her teammates and coaches, as Lewis did in 1988. "Any runner should be able to pass a baton," Lewis once said. But for Jones, it has all gone wrong this year. She is no longer just any runner. Now she sees the world from the ruins.