One gold down, four to go

Well, hello Mrs Jones. Last night Marion Jones won the first of what will be many gold medals in flourishing style as she successfully opened her quest to win as many golds in one week as Steve Redgrave has accumulated over 16 years.

It was a cake-walk for the woman destined for the cat-walk. She started quick, middled better and finished so fast that the rest of the field was left in a heap five yards behind. Just one runner was within half a second of her and Ekaterini Thanou of Greece only edged into that category by 0.03 of a second. The gap between Jones and Thanou is by a hundredth of a second greater than the gap that separated Thanou and the woman who finished plumb last of 16 in the semi-finals.

Jones has not been beaten since September 1997 and it is most unlikely to be beaten between now and, well, when she retires.

Her dominance is only matched by the serenity with which it is achieved. Some sprinters are all aquiver at the start; fellow American sprint gold medallist Maurice Greene, for instance, prances backwards and forwards, reels from side to side and moves his tongue in and out and round and round. Jones, in contrast, adopts a simple routine. She does a few brief exercises and then with her lips slightly apart and her eyes fixed on the mid-distance she repeats a little mantra, takes a deep breath, and settles on the starting blocks.

Last night, she needed to go through the motions thrice. First, Debbie Ferguson put her arm up just before the gun and the runners were called back. Second, Thanou false-started. And then after a lengthy pause so the audience could root for Aussie Emma George in the woman's pole-vault qualifying competition - an unwelcome break - the race was finally away.

It was over in strides. Jones running with perfect rhythm and balance and without apparent effort was second fastest away from the gun, ahead within metres and before you could think it was a question not of who, but of how far.

At the end, having run her best time for the season, she smiled, laughed and then promptly burst into tears. 'I vowed I'd keep my cool when I crossed the line, but all that went out of the window,' she explained. 'When I saw my family I almost lost it. This is 19 years of believing and dreaming and it all comes down to one moment, one race.'

It is the 19 years of effort being reduced to a matter of 10 seconds to determine whether it receives its reward, or not, that goes to the heart of the 100 metres. There is no sporting event quite like it. A tennis match foreshortened to one serve, one return, wouldn't even come close and the only near equivalent might be the man who worked for 20 years and then took all his earnings to Las Vegas and gambled them a single spin of the roulette wheel.

Yet even that analogy doesn't stack up, for our gambler is placing his fate in the croupier's hands, whereas Mrs Jones can determine her own destiny. And the only thing that was ever going to stop her winning gold yesterday was if she'd decided to play in the NBA instead. She missed the Atlanta Olympics because she was playing college basketball at North Carolina, Michael Jordan's alma mater, and only took up running full-time in 1997. Since then, she's been beaten once.

Her winning streak may have rid the event of the element of competition fairly necessary to top-notch sport but it has added some much needed innocence to a race where Florence Griffith-Joyner still holds the Olympic record for her long-fingernailed and vein-pop ping run in Seoul. There is nothing so flashy or suspicious about Mrs Jones.

Indeed the only question mark you can place over her character is the fact that she married a shotputter - the current world champion C.J. Hunter. (Ms Jones marrying C.J; Rigsby's beloved getting hitched to Reggie Perrin's boss. I trust Leonard Rossiter was looking on.) But that blemish cannot detract from a night when Marion Jones was the heroine.

In the two other events where the medals were doled out a spirit of mateship prevailed. The javelin - an event that is better live, as you see the javelin spearing towards the Olympic torch - came down to a battle between Jan Zelezny and Steve Backley and for the third consecutive Olympics Zelezny prevailed.

'I know it is very difficult for Steve because he never win an Olympic Games, but I say to Steve, "Sorry, sorry,"' said Zelezny. 'To watch Jan training, I can't keep up with him. He trains and trains and trains,' said Backley.

The theme continued after the men's 100 metres - an event surprisingly lacking in drama - as Maurice Greene said: 'I owe him [coach John Smith], I owe Ato Boldon and I owe God.' (That'll be a bronze for God, then.)

Boldon, meanwhile, said: 'What I got in the 100 was gravy,' and looked at Greene as you might an adored elder brother.

Hang on a minute, lads. Whatever happened to loathing each others guts and creating a bit of back-story: Lewis v Johnson, Christie v The World, that kind of thing. This was all a bit too Zen for people who like their sport raw. I'll do my best and what will be will be rather than the ends justify the means and the devil take the hindmost.

In the events still to be resolved there were rare pockets of drama. In the heptathlon, overnight leader Eunice Barber didn't so much shot putt as shot drop the putt just over the 10m line. Her dismal performance screwed up her mind so much that at the start of the next event, the 200m, she stood beside the blocks holding her head in both hands as if checking that a brain was still there.

Meanwhile in the 400m there was a rare Aussie cheer as Cathy Freeman won her heat relatively comfortably but not particularly prettily - there is none of the sublime grace of a Johnson or a Jones about the torch-lighter.

And Britain's Katharine Merry, with red sores around the edges of her nose - sinusitis, apparently, looked spookily robotic as she made her focused way round the track to qualify.

So robotic, in fact, that there was a moment when it looked as if Merry might go round the track again had there not been people in the way.

But the hero was Jones who smiled all three of her smiles - the half, the three-quarter and the full beamer - while on the podium and now looks set fair to revisit it a further four times by the end of the week.

And the fear. Well, the fear is the same old fear. During his lap of honour Greene removed his footwear, throwing his shoes in the crowd and, for a lap, became Shoeless Mo. The nagging worry is that at some time during the next week one of the thousands of athletes performing last night will fail a drugs test and we will be forced to ask, 'Say it ain't so?'