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Eight tasks, actually. Against her coach-husband's resistance, she insists on long jumping with the long jumpers as well as the heptathletes. When she jumped 24 ft. 5 1/2 in. to equal the world record last year, Kersee was the one who wept. "I always cheer for my athlete, never for my wife," he says. "As soon as the husband starts to worry 'That's my wife out there in pain,' the coach has to say 'Shut up and get back in the stands.' But you can't always separate them. She's fun to coach when she's not in one of her rebellious moods, but that tenacity is what makes her the world's greatest." In other words, if she wants to jump, she jumps.
. "Jumping has always been the thing to me," she says. "It's like leaping for joy, but of course there's more to it than that. Galina Chistyakova ((U.S.S.R.)) has just done 25 ft., Heike Drechsler ((G.D.R.)) is on the runway and I'm behind her. You have to respond here and now. It lets you know what you're made of." Throwing things never thrilled her quite as much, but she says, "I've learned to enjoy it all, even the 'big man's' events."
At 5 ft. 10 in., 153 lbs., Joyner-Kersee is a streamlined strong woman who puts no one in mind of a weight lifter. "I wish I could take Babe Didrikson's arm," she says, "and put it on mine." Jackie smiles at, but endorses, her sister-in-law Florence Griffith Joyner's frilly expressions of track and pulchritude, and favors lipstick shades that outblush fire engines. "I don't think being an athlete is unfeminine. I think of it as a kind of grace."
She doesn't object to the compliment, but she doesn't really think of herself as the greatest woman athlete in the world. "It's just a phrase," she says. In the Olympic trials, when Griffith Joyner upstaged her steady dominance with the flash of a record 100 meters, Joyner-Kersee had a way to smile at that too. Flo is Al's wife, and he's her coach now. Al just missed repeating on the team, but he won't miss the Games. Jackie might have felt a little old and left behind without him.
Enduring athletes often look back in amazement at how long they have remained. But Great Britain's Daley Thompson, the second decathlete to win two Olympic gold medals, the first in all history to covet a third, set out to stay. At Montreal in 1976, when he was 18, Thompson observed Bruce Jenner's triumph from the shade of 18th place and had an outlandish notion. Even before his 1980 victory in Moscow, he confided it to the 1948 and '52 champion Bob Mathias. "I got a postcard from Russia," Mathias recalls. "All it said was 'I'm going for three.' "
In Los Angeles four years ago, Thompson was a loud and wonderful cinch. But the going has not been as easy lately. His nine unbeaten summers ended at last year's world championships in Rome, when he more than surrendered his world title to the East German Torsten Voss. Out of fettle because of an early season groin pull, Thompson stubbornly pressed on when he might have dropped out, and finished a poignant ninth. Since then, he has entered only fragments of events, with desultory results, and in an incomplete exhibition last month looked down, if not done. Track & Field News had picked him in June to win the third gold, but is wavering now. Favoring Voss, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED failed to mention either Thompson or his historic foil, 6-ft. 7-in. Jurgen Hingsen of West Germany, among the likely top three in Seoul.