A dream turned sour: Perec flees Sydney

Add as a preferred source on Google

Sydney: Marie-Jose Perec fled the Olympic stage with tears in her eyes after her dream to revive her glory days of Atlanta and Barcelona finally turned sour.

Australia was asleep when the 32-year-old Frenchwoman, whose showdown with local darling Cathy Freeman would have provided one of the highlights of the athletics competition, left Sydney for Melbourne late on Wednesday.

A few hours later she boarded a plane bound for London, losing her gamble to collect the fourth Olympic gold medal of her tumultuous career. Her agent, Annick Avierinos, said Perec was in tears when she told her she was departing because a man had forced her way into her hotel room and threatened her.

The accommodation on Sydney's Darling Harbour where she had been staying said they had received no report of any security breach. Nicknamed Garbo by Australian journalists tired of waiting for her to talk, the mystery woman of the Sydney Games lived up to her elusive reputation until the very end of her Australian adventure.

Historic double

Nobody apart from herself and her German coach Wolfgang Meier really knew where she stood. Diagnosed with the debilitating Epstein-Barr syndrome shortly after her Atlanta triumph, where she won an unprecedented 200-400 metres double, she has barely competed since.

Raised in the French West Indies island of Guadeloupe, where she was brought up by her grandmother, Perec was a shy, stubborn child nicknamed "Canne a sucre" (Sugar Cane) by her friends for her long, skinny legs.

But she sure could run and at 16, she moved to France and soon developed into a statuesque athlete courted by media and sponsors. She did not disappoint them, winning the 400 metres final in Barcelona in 1992 to become the first Frenchwoman to claim an athletics Olympic gold medal since Colette Besson in 1968.

The fiercely independent Perec, who has always had a difficult relationship with French athletics officials, not to mention journalists, then made a bold move by joining the stable of American guru John Smith to train with the likes of Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon.

France had lost her but Smith's coaching methods soon turned her into a merciless winning machine.

In Atlanta she reached the pinnacle of her career, outclassing Freeman in a stunning 48.25 seconds before taking on Merlene Ottey in the 200, an event she had competed only a few times. A breathtaking finish saw her win that race too to make Olympic history.

She became a star, happily taking glamorous poses for women's magazines and lending her sleek body to haute couture outfits.

Then everything went wrong.

String of injuries

A string of injuries followed her illness and she kept pulling out of meetings and major championships.

Probably feeling she had nothing to lose, she left the Californian sun earlier this year for the dull Baltic port of Rostock, where she started training under the guidance of Meier.

He is the husband and former coach of great East German sprinter Marita Koch, whose 400 metres world record of 47.60 set in 1985 still stands.Many mocked her, remembering she had once dismissed Koch's mark as drug-assisted.

"I didn't come here to hide and take drugs," she said last April in Rostock, where she lived in one of the town's few decent hotels with her companion, American 400 metres runner Anthuan Maybank.

She worked hard, hoping to move back into the spotlight on the track of Stadium Australia, where she was scheduled to race her first heat on Saturday.

French coach Francois Pepin, who launched Perec's career, said last week that he felt she could have won in Sydney because she had so much more class than Freeman.

But as a person, Pepin said he preferred the Australian.

"Marie-Jose sometimes behaves as if she were the centre of the universe," he said. "But she is a fantastic athlete. You can't take that away from her.