Electronic Telegraph
Friday 22 September 2000
FOR ALL her brilliance on the track, Marie-Jos� P�rec is as well known for
her erratic behaviour as for her gold medals. Given her lack of races this
season, there were always doubts about her participation in the Olympics,
but her midnight flit from Sydney was not the way such a great champion
should surrender her title.
She has been described as temperamental, even paranoid, but her latest
escapade in abandoning the French team rates as merely bizarre.
At 32, the Guadeloupe-born P�rec can look back on three Olympic gold medals,
two world titles and a winning time in Atlanta which made her the
third-fastest woman in history over 400 metres.
In 1996 she emulated Michael Johnson in winning both the 200m and the 400m,
but her achievement was largely overlooked by the partisan American crowd.
In France, where she was taken to live as a child, she is a superstar, feted
wherever she goes and a familiar face on the cover of the country's top
fashion and lifestyle magazines.
When she withdrew from circulation in 1998 after being struck down by the
debilitating Epstein-Barr Syndrome, P�rec's absence and the ensuing rumours
about a possible comeback only added to her fame.
But the 6ft 1in runner who models for Christian Dior rarely appears to be
enjoying the limelight. Like so many celebrities, she began her career by
courting publicity only to shun it once the novelty had worn off.
Her unfailing ability to disappoint has earned her the title of the Greta
Garbo of athletics. In 1999 she began the summer by hinting that she might
make a comeback in time for the World Championships in Seville. Several
meetings were cited as possible venues for her first race since 1997.
But with tickets sold and journalists already planning flights to cities
across Europe, P�rec would let it be known that the comeback had been
postponed.
When she did finally appear, it was to be beaten by Britain's Christine
Bloomfield over 200m at a meeting in Malmo. P�rec did not race again that
summer.
At the start of this year she sprung her biggest surprise to date by
announcing that she had left John Smith's group of athletes in Los Angeles -
who include Maurice Greene, Ato Boldon and Inger Miller - to train under the
guidance of the former East German coach, Wolfgang Meier, the husband of
Marita Koch, whose world record of 47.60sec still stands after 15 years.
Smith's group, it transpired, had grown too big for the woman who demanded a
coach's individual attention.
>From LA, P�rec moved to Rostock, where she lived in cramped quarters under
the Baltic port's stadium and submitted herself to Meier's intensive regime.
Despite fuelling speculation that a third Olympic 400m title was a
possibility, she managed only two races during the summer. She was beaten in
both and pulled out of five more, including a race in Oslo against
Australia's gold medal favourite, Cathy Freeman.
Her arrival in Sydney was surprise enough. Her departure, just 36 hours
before she was due to race in the first-round heats, in front of 110,000 at
Stadium Australia was, in the circumstances, no surprise at all.
Eamonn Condon
WWW.RunnersGoal.com
