Asked for her favorite moment of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hurdler Lolo Jones had a ready answer."The moment right before I hit that ninth hurdle, " she replied.
"The moment right before I hit that ninth hurdle," she replied.
It is perhaps one of the most indelible images of the 29th Olympiad. Jones was crumpled in a heap on the burnt orange track, her dreams shattered.
Jones, a Des Moines, Iowa, native who overcame a lifetime of hard knocks and heartaches in her early years just to get to LSU, was expected to leave Beijing with Olympic gold, fame and fortune.
The fame part, she got.
After breezing through every qualifying meet to become the queen of the 100-meter hurdles, Jones was a fan favorite among the Beijing athletes last summer.
Her talent was one reason. Her time of 12.29 at the 2008 Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore., was the fastest in the world last year. Her beauty was another. So the world was waiting and watching as Jones prepared to grasp the Olympic glory that seemed well within her reach.
But things didn't quite go as planned.
She was leading the field of the best women hurdlers in the world -- until she got to the ninth hurdle. That's when her right heel clipped the top of the bar and she stumbled. In milliseconds, Jones went from first to seventh, from front-runner to also-ran, from hero to heartbroken.
"I was shocked," Jones said in her post-race comments. "I worked so hard for this, and it disappeared in less than a second."
And although Jones was able to scrape herself off the track in Beijing, she has not been able to raise herself above it. She has continued to struggle on the track, nagged by injuries and inconsistency.
She finished seventh in a meet in Oslo and eighth in Lausanne. Three times since last summer she has run into a hurdle. Despite a bursa sac injury on her right leg, she ran the Drake Relays in April. This time she clipped the third-to-last hurdle and failed to finish.
Last month she failed to reach the finals at the USA Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Ore., after bumping into a fellow competitor and clipping a hurdle.
Hoping to break that streak, Jones was scheduled to compete today at Meeting Areva in France.
In an online diary, Jones talked about her recent disappointments, about how she has gone from being guaranteed lanes in meets to having to fight for spots.
"The last few weeks have obviously been tough for me," Jones wrote. "The hurdles is sometimes such an unforgiving event. I'm now the one fighting for lanes and trying to fight my way back to the top. It feels like my rookie season all over again. It is hard because after enjoying the best season in my life last year I'm now having the worst season of my life. And it is not like I've been let down gently, it is from one extreme to the other. I am still down. It sucks."