Life is Tweet for track queen Jones

Published on Saturday 23 January 2010 20:32

IT MIGHT be deemed off limits for the stars of Manchester United but it is nigh-on compulsory for Lolo Jones. The edict from within Old Trafford is that Tweeting is banned lest, one presumes, someone makes a twit of himself by admitting to, say, running up huge unserviceable debts.

Instead, you could do worse than sign up to the stream of consciousness offered by America’s current queen of the track. Warm, accessible and funny, it provides a window into the daily existence of the woman who, but for a calamitous plunge into the last hurdle in Beijing, would likely now be the reigning Olympic champion. “Sometimes, I’m like, ‘wow, my life is pretty cool’,” Jones admits, a day after a brush with A-list actor and fellow Iowa native, Elijah Wood, at a charity lunch. “But at the same time, the celebrity stuff doesn’t go very far. It’s not like I get to do that every day.”

Even it were possible, she’d take a pass. The reigning world indoor champion is preparing to fly to Glasgow to captain Team USA in Saturday’s Aviva international at the Kelvin Hall against Germany, Sweden, the Commonwealth and Great Britain. “The good thing about the indoors is that there are only five hurdles,” she jokes. “Every time I’ve got injured, it happened over the eighth.”

Jones, who takes on Jessica Ennis, will seek maximum points while the Americans have chosen a strong squad to effectively challenge the hosts. “I’ve been going to Glasgow for three years now and we’ve never won,” she declares. “So it would be good to bring back the trophy.”

The Aviva meeting, in reality, remains a mere staging post on the road to claiming the gold in London in 2012 that fate denied her two years ago. Having come this far, her path will not be diverted by bumps and bruises, Hollywood parties nor the grind of the training track.

Life, from a young age, taught her that hard work was essential to flourish. As a child, Jones moved from house to house and school to school, her single mother coping with the challenges of raising five kids with not a dime to spare. With her father often in prison, home, for a while, became the basement of a church in her home city of Des Moines. “As a kid you just adjust,” she reflects. “It was weird. It was definitely weird. But I was just a kid.”

Athletics afforded an escape toward stability and she won a sports scholarship to Louisiana State University, which changed her life.

“My coach told me ‘you’ve got potential, you’re talented. If you keep training, you can be an Olympic athlete’. I couldn’t believe it. So it was cool he believed in me.”

Now 27, her formative exposure to her future career came in 1996, watching the Atlanta Olympics on TV. “I said to myself that I wanted to do this. I want to go to the Olympics.”

It will be music to the ears of Lord Coe but Jones claims to be a living and breathing legacy of what the Games can accomplish. “Kids in London, or the people around the UK, might not see the effects right away. But they will see the effects of having it in their region. I was inspired. It’s just going to be brilliant.”

MARK WOODS

Tickets for the Aviva International are available are available by phone on 08000 556056 or online at www.uka.org.uk.