Sprint queen Marion Jones and swimmer Ian Thorpe are among those hoping to strike multiple gold in Sydney Grant Shimmin On Monday evening, Australian time, the bulk of South Africa’s 130-strong Olympic team will take up residence in the future Sydney suburb of Newington which is the athletes’ village for this month’s games. For them, the final countdown to the greatest show on earth will have begun. When they arrive, it’ll be 11 days until the Olympic flame is lit and 26 days until what the Americans are hoping will be the coronation of the all-time queen of the games. Marion Jones is bidding for five gold medals at a single Olympiad. But let me put my cards on the table right up front; she ain’t gonna do it. I’ve got nothing against the former basketballer, in fact, I’m a big fan. When she flashes that smile after a victory, it’s impossible to imagine that there is a malicious bone in her body, but she’s bitten off more than she can chew. And I have to say that to me, there’s a certain arrogance about announcing you’re going for five Olympic track and field titles when you’ve yet to win one. There’s no doubt that, barring injuries, Jones will streak away with the 100m and 200m golds, but if she wins the long jump, I think a generation of the world’s greatest exponents of that discipline will lose their lunch, because the woman can’t jump for toffee. Anyone who’s watched her Golden League outings recently will have been aware of middle-distance great Steve Ovett cringing in the commentary box when he has to describe a Jones effort. Clearly, the world’s greatest sprinter sees her exceptional speed as a way of compensating for the absence of a recognisable long-jump technique. Her strides shorten as she approaches the board and more than once I’ve seen her have to adjust her run-up at the last to avoid no- jumping, robbing her of much of the momentum her impressive speed has built up. And let’s not go into her actual jump action. Hopefully justice will prevail in that event and a specialist, like Italy’s Fiona May, Tatyana Kotova, the Russian who has four Golden League victories this season, Inessa Kravets of the Ukraine, Cuban Lissete Cuza or Jones’s teammate, Dawn Burrell, will come up trumps. The other factor against Jones is that the finals of the 4x100m and 4x400m relays take place on the same evening – September 30. Big US relay squads mean she’ll probably only run in the finals, but two in one night is a tall order and the US aren’t certs for gold in either. At last year’s world championships, with Jones injured after taking a fall in the 200m heats, they finished fourth in the 4x100m, behind the Bahamas, France and Jamaica. This year they narrowly lead the world list, but the Bahamas, amazingly, have four women under 11 seconds in the 100m – Chandra Sturrup, Eldece Clarke- Lewis, Debbie Ferguson and Pauline Davis- Thompson – and Sevatheda Fynes on a pedestrian 11,04 seconds. In the 4x400m, world leaders Russia and Nigeria could both challenge strongly. By the time the track and field programme gets under way, much of the patriotic fervour of the Australians will have been spent, leaving the way clear for likely men’s sprint champions Maurice Greene (100m) and Ato Boldon (200m) to contest the title of the biggest post-race poseur without too much distraction. For the host nation, the aquatic centre just down Olympic Boulevard from the main stadium is where most of the medal action is likely to take place, though the one likely home-grown track champion, Cathy Freeman, is bound to attract huge support, having overcome a difficult year personally to lead the world convincingly in the 400m. Down at the pool, though, they should be raking in the medals and the world records, with Ian Thorpe, the 17-year-old whose shoe size matches his age, set to join the legends immortalised in brass plaques on the Path of Champions outside the aquatic complex.
In the 200m and 400m freestyle, the towering teenager looks an even safer bet than Jones is in the individual sprints on the track , while Grant Hackett and two- time champion Kieren Perkins could fight it out for the 1 500m title, though not without some serious attention from America’s Eric Vendt and South Africa’s own Ryk Neethling. The Olympics is really all about the swimming and athletics. Anything else is secondary. But as with every games, other codes will throw up exceptional individual achievements and poignant moments that immortalise the protagonists. Remember Kerri Strug, the gymnast whose selfless vault on to a damaged ankle gave the US the gymnastics team gold in Atlanta, but cost her participation in the individual competition? She’s not there this time, and neither are Atlanta team- mates Shannon Miller and Dominique Moceanu, due to injury. Nevertheless, an exceptional competition seems a given in artistic gymnastics. Will it be Dominic Dawes, Amy Chow, Svetlana Khorkina, Elena Zamolodtchikova or someone else taking the individual all-around title? Who knows, but it’ll take a superhuman effort. On the state-of-the-art rowing and canoeing course at Penrith, west of Sydney, history will be in the making for the British men’s coxless four and for one member in particular. Steve Redgrave, now 38, bids to win gold for the fifth games in a row. He won’t be the first, or even the second – Hungarian Aladar Genevich won six straight fencing golds in the team sabre, the last five with Pal Kovacs as a team-mate – but if he does it, the man from the Leander club will surely deserve his place among the Olympic immortals. Much was made of the fact that the crew of Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent, James Cracknell and Tim Foster finished fourth in the last race of this year’s World Cup in Lucerne recently. But the quartet has been largely unchanged since 1997 and has annexed three world titles in that time, so they shouldn’t be written off. The games could barely have a more scenic start, with triathlon, making its Olympic debut, starting its events, the first of the games in Sydney itself – soccer kicks off earlier in other cities – in Sydney harbour. With plans to deploy divers to scare off sharks having been scrapped, the more dramatically minded might be fearing the worst. Don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of drama throughout the fortnight, but I can’t believe it’ll be of that kind. Might be some rapid times on the swim leg, though.