JONES, Marion Lois

(b. 12 October 1975 in Los Angeles, California), basketball champion and sprinter widely considered to be the fastest woman in the world.

Jones is the daughter of George Jones and Marion Toler. When Jones was a child, her father abandoned the family. Later, her parents divorced. Her mother, who had emigrated from Belize to the United States, worked as a medical and legal transcriber and raised Jones and her older brother Albert.

An active child, Jones was exposed to various sports and excelled in all of them. She played T-ball, basketball, and softball, participated in gymnastics, and took ballet and tap dancing lessons. At the age of five Jones began running track and first played organized basketball when she was eleven. Impressed by the way Jones played basketball, the track coach Jack Dawson invited her to join his middle-school track club. She quickly dominated the competitions and won a national high school title in eighth grade. "I felt confident that she could be an Olympian," said Dawson. At the age of twelve Jones was competing internationally.

Before her ninth-grade year, the family relocated again to Camarillo in Ventura County, and Jones attended Rio Mesa High School, an ethnically mixed school in Oxnard. There she attracted national attention in basketball and track. In 1989 Jones was the first freshman in history to win California's state high school championship in the 100- and 200-meter dash. She won both events again in 1990. At the 1991 U.S. championships, Jones ran the 200 meters in 22.87 seconds, the fourth-fastest time recorded that year in the United States. In 1992, before her junior year, Toler moved the family once again to Thousand Oaks so that her daughter could attend the mostly white Thousand Oaks High School, where she had more opportunities for basketball. At Thousand Oaks High School she continued to dominate the track.

In the 1992 U.S. Olympic Trials in New Orleans, Jones set a national high school record in the 200 meters that still stood through 1999, and she qualified as an alternate in the 4 × 100–meter relay in Barcelona but turned down the opportunity to run the relay. Jones finished sixth in the 100 meters and fourth in the 200, missing a spot on the team by .07 of a second. Her record at the time was the ninth fastest by a woman and the fastest for a woman under the age of eighteen. Jones's winning long jump of twenty-two-and-a-half feet was the second longest in history by a high-school competitor. In the 1992 world junior championships, she placed fifth in the 100 meters and seventh in the 200, and secured the second-runner spot on the U.S. 4 × 100–meter relay team, an accomplishment Jones called "the highlight of her track career." In June 1993 she won three events, the 100- and 200-meter dash, and the long jump, and was the first person to win nine California state titles at the California state high school track meet.

Celebrated as the greatest American female high school track and field athlete, Jones was also California's best female high school basketball player. She averaged 22.8 points in her final season and led Thousand Oaks to two state championship games, winning the title in 1992. By the time she graduated in 1993, Jones had won three consecutive Gatorade Circle of Champions National High School Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year Awards. Jones is the only athlete to have won the award more than once. It was the first time in fifty years that a woman had won three national titles.

In the fall of 1993 Jones enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and her legend continued to grow. A forward in high school basketball, Jones was moved to point guard in her fourth collegiate game. In 1994 she led the Lady Tar Heels to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I title, the first ever for UNC and the first for an Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) school. Jones became the leader of the team, averaging 14.1 points per game. Her speed earned her the nickname "Flash." By her second year of college, Jones became the first female sophomore in UNC's basketball history to score more than 1,000 career points. She was named to the ACC's first All-Star team, and she earned All-America honors. The team finished with a record of 30–5 but lost to Stanford University in the NCAA tournament.

Injuries forced Jones to miss her junior year, and the Lady Tar Heels went 13–14. Jones resumed her basketball career in 1996 and helped return the Tar Heels to the elite of women's college basketball. "It's unbelievable how big a factor Marion is," her teammate, Jessica Gaspar, told USA Today. Jones finished as one of the five finalists for the Naismith Award (presented annually to the male and female college players of the year) and was named All-America third team. She concluded the 1996–1997 season with an average of 18.1 points per game. During her three years playing at UNC, Jones averaged 16.8 points and scored 1,716 points. In spring 1997 she graduated from UNC with a B.A. in journalism and communications.

That April, she also began training with Trevor Graham, a silver medalist in the 4 × 400–meter relay. Jones won the 100-meter dash and the long jump at the 1997 U.S. national championships, then two gold medals in the 100 and the 4 × 100 relay at the world championship in Athens. Jones's winning jump was the longest by a woman that year.

At the 1998 U.S. Nationals in New Orleans, Jones won three titles and placed first in three events: the 100- and 200-meter dash and the long jump. That same year at the Goodwill Games in New York, she again won the 100 and 200 meters. Jones finished the year ranked number one in the world in those two events and in the long jump. Her miracle season continued at the World Cup in September 1998 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she won the 200-meter dash and was the third fastest and fourth fastest in the 100 meters. Jones's thirty-seven consecutive wins ended in Johannesburg, where she finished second in the long jump.

On 3 October 1998 Jones married C. J. Hunter, the world shot-put champion, whom she had met two years earlier in the UNC weight room, and who inspired her to give up basketball and pursue a professional career in track and field. The following year she won the 100 meters and the long jump at the World Championships in Seville, Spain, but suffered a back injury and withdrew from the 200-meter final. Jones came back during the July 1999 U.S. trials and won her three main events, which qualified her for the Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

At the age of twenty-four, Jones became the world's highest profiled female athlete for pursuing five gold medals during the 2000 Olympic Games. In spite of the drug scandal that surrounded her husband and challenged her athletic dream in Sydney (Hunter had tested positive for steroids and was not allowed to compete in the Games), Jones proved to the world that she was a true competitor when she won three gold and two bronze medals.

In June 2001 Jones announced her separation from Hunter. The following month, the triple-time Olympic star went on to reaffirm her status as the top female sprinter in the world at the Goodwill Games in Brisbane, Australia, winning the 100-meter dash in 11.04 seconds.

Jones, "America's Golden Girl," is considered to be one of the most celebrated athletes in the world. Besides competing in sports, Jones speaks to youth groups about hard work and staying in school, and is a courtside reporter for NBC coverage of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). Her unfailing determination and relentless competitiveness made her the most decorated female sprinter at a single Olympics. Only three other athletes, Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis, and Fanny Blankerskoen, have won four gold medals in a single Olympics. Nike recognized Jones's achievements and made a shoe for her. The five-foot-ten athlete is ranked as one of the greatest stars in U.S. track history.

There is one biography of Jones, Ron Rapoport, See How She Runs: Marion Jones and the Making of a Champion (2000). Current Biography Yearbook (1998) has useful information on Jones's career. John Brant, "Sight Set on Sydney," Runners World (Sept. 1998), has invaluable information about her career. Bennett Kinnon, "Marion Jones: America's Golden Girl," Ebony (Mar. 2001), discusses the controversy surrounding Jones's husband and about her life in the fast lane.

Njoki-Wa-Kinyatti