Perece wasn't in shape, says Aussie head coach

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Sydney: Australian newspapers accused French track star Marie-Jose Perec on Friday of fleeing Sydney because she did not want to face local favourite Cathy Freeman in an eagerly awaited 400 metres Olympic showdown.

"Mademoiselle La Chicken" was the splash headline in Friday's Daily Telegraph tabloid. It said she was "running scared".

The tabloid quoted Australian head coach Chris Wardlaw as saying Perec would only have quit the Games if she knew she was not in sufficiently good shape to challenge for a third successive 400 metres Olympic title.

"I think if she is not here she obviously wasn't in shape, so it wouldn't have been a great race (between her and Freeman) anyway. She's obviously not ready to run," Wardlaw said.

"She's the athlete of the decade in the 90s, a truly great athlete, and obviously in her mind she wasn't going to be able to compete up to that level."Perec was flying back to Paris on Friday after fleeing the Sydney Games in tears saying a man had threatened her in her hotel.

The Australian newspaper chose the headline "Perec's Great Escape". "Perec would never admit she could not beat Freeman," it said."An alleged aggressive intruder at her hotel door yelling at her to leave gave her the escape hatch she needed."

Perec, 32, won the 400 metres title at the 1992 Barcelona Games and then scored a 200-400 metres double four years later in Atlanta. The runner from Guadeloupe has been plagued by illness and injury since Atlanta and raced only twice this year.

The fiercely independent Perec, who has always had a difficult relationship with athletics officials and the media, had been under a great deal of pressure ahead of her expected showdown with Freeman. Perec lived up to her reputation in Sydney by shunning the French athletics team's official news conference on Tuesday. She also irritated French officials by declining to join their team training camp in the Sydney suburb of Narrabeen.

Perec took a gamble earlier this year by leaving the stable of American coaching guru John Smith to join German Wolfgang Meier, the husband and former coach of former East German sprinter Marita Koch who still holds the 400 metres world record.

(c) Reuters Limited.