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From now on, Florence may also be a star. Since the trials, she has been flooded with requests for interviews and invitations to compete. She's done more talking than racing. She chose to run at only two European meets and posted respectable but unspectacular times (she claims that a head wind was at fault in one of the races). Al reports that she has turned down $200,000 in race invitations since she broke the world record. "Let others chase the fool's gold. We'll chase the real gold. It's like we have a savings account. We drew out a little in July. But this," he says, referring to Seoul, "is the house we want."
And Griffith Joyner has the explosive power to get it. In late August she was out doing a morning workout on the track at the University of California at Irvine. Al, as usual, was running some warm-ups with her. All of a sudden, Florence shot off like a Lycra bullet, leaving her husband well behind. Her 160-meter sprints were so draining that she would walk slowly and deliberately around the rest of the quarter-mile track to allow her body to recover. As the Games approach, her sights seem tightly focused. She refuses to say whether she thinks she'll do better in the 100 or the 200 in Seoul. But Flo-Jo does concede that she will run both races in a standard U.S. team uniform, not the one-legger that has become her signature.