She is the standard this time. The Olympics will be considered a success if the course of international sweetness and light runs and jumps and generally glides along as smoothly as Jackie Joyner-Kersee. A third of a second late in 1984, she had to wait four full years for her time to come, to go flying leglong into Seoul like a streamer of confetti.
Dashing, racing, hurdling, hurtling, heaving cannon balls, slinging spears -- long jumping on the side -- Joyner-Kersee has at last reached the station her grandmother foretold 26 years ago in naming her after a First Lady of the U.S. Momentarily, Jacqueline means to be the First Lady of the world, not only in the heptathlon and the Olympics but in women's athletics entirely.
As Daley Thompson has been the natural heir to Jim Thorpe, she would be the Seoul beneficiary of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Joyner-Kersee and Thompson, the two-time Olympic decathlon champion, puffing for three, embody all the basic wonders of the Games and encompass almost every grade of emotion. One is just arriving at a place the other has been straining to maintain. She's the blur; he's the mist. They have a "special understanding," as he likes to put it, and a few things to say.
She comes from East St. Louis, Ill., which is more than just seven miles removed from St. Louis. In rapid order, she was the second of four children born to children, Alfred Joyner and Mary Gaines, 14 and 16 the day they wed. When Jackie says she's preoccupied lately with thoughts of "all the people who dedicated themselves to helping a young girl dream," she starts with a family huddled several generations strong in either the coldest or the warmest ( house on Piggott Avenue, across the street from a tavern, down the block from a pool hall, around the corner (blessedly) from a playground.
The boy-father started out shining shoes, mowing lawns and "watching cars" in that estimable neighborhood. When he eventually found formal work, ultimately as a brakeman on the railroad, it carried him far from home for considerable stretches. With a willow switch, Mary took charge. "She applied some disciplines just for discipline's sake," recalls Jackie, "like making us wear our clothes back-to-back. 'Why the same thing two days in a row?' I'd plead. 'Can't I stagger them?' 'No,' she'd say. 'This is the rule of the house.' "
There are cheerleaders and there are athletes. Nearly no one but Jackie was both. "From being a cheerleader at the youth center, I knew at the age of nine that I could jump. That's when I started running and jumping off my porch." A firemen's brigade of siblings used a potato-chip bag to "borrow" sand from the center and install a landing pit off the porch. Jackie's main co-conspirator was her older brother Al, whom she could beat at everything. "I didn't have a big brother," Al says. "I had Jackie." Through a fluttering porch-side window shade, enjoying the sounds of plotting, their father heard 14-year-old Jackie announce one evening that someday she was going to be in the Olympic Games.