Griffith Joyner Lets Pulses Do the Racing

Florence Griffith Joyner, the body in Seoul, enters a room and experiences what Betty Grable or Marilyn Monroe or Farrah Fawcett experienced when they were America’s pinup girls, glamour pusses, heartthrobs, whatever one labeled them, and found themselves unable to move a muscle without causing a disturbance.

The shutters click like crickets and the flashbulbs go off, pof, pof, pof, as FloJo works her way into the room, squeezing past the paparazzi, swiveling left and right just to keep from bumping the photographers who dog her every step. Her husband, Al Joyner, uses her arm as a rudder, changing directions through the aisle, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me. Pof, pof, pof. They go with the Flo.

The race is on, even though Griffith Joyner hasn’t run a step yet. The Olympic track and field events do not even begin for six days, but clearly we have here the star of the show--bigger than Carl Lewis, bigger than Greg Louganis, bigger than Matt Biondi, bigger than anybody else the Americans brought with them to Asia. So big that the stories and gossip and whispers already follow her wherever she goes.

The loudest whisper:

Is she hurt?

Is there something wrong with the fastest woman in the world, something physical that will keep her from dominating the sprint events and vanquishing another world record and splashing and flashing that cover-girl face on television screens and billboards all over creation? Hey, you step into a subway station in Seoul and see Carl Lewis ads, which is more than you can say for New York. Florence Griffith Joyner’s kisser could end up absolutely everywhere, if all goes well.

So, Flo, are you hurt? We hear you’re hurt. What are your injuries?

“No,” says Griffith Joyner. “I don’t have any injuries.”

So, where did these stories start?

“I have no idea.”

So, it’s just a rumor, then?

“Yes,” says Griffith Joyner. “It is a rumor.”

As it turns out, there really was some basis to the rumor, as there usually is. Sunday, after practice, Florence and Al admitted that he had backed a baggage cart into her heel and she had a sore Achilles’ tendon for a couple of days.

Nothing major.

You tell yourself, sure, this is what happens to someone in the fast lane. Rumors run rampant, and no woman on Earth is so fast in any lane as Florence.

Of course, you also tell yourself, hey, if you truly were injured, and all your adversaries would get their hopes raised by this news, and all the wise guys would think that you were just preparing your alibi in case you lose, would you publicly admit that you were injured, or would you fib, because hey, who would blame you? In the wide world of sports, this would not be considered lying. It would be considered strategy.

Griffith Joyner maintains that she has no adversaries, that she has but one rival, that being herself. In her husky, Anita Baker-meets-Lauren Bacall voice she says: “I never think about anybody I compete against. My main competition is myself. I’m here now, I know what I have to do, and I’m going to do whatever it takes. If I do it, I’ll come out a winner, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else does.”

She does things her way, always has, this kid from the Los Angeles projects who used to outrun all the boys down at the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation, who used to wear her pet boa constrictor around her throat like a necklace when she went to the mall, who used to cultivate Howard Hughes-length fingernails and paint rainbows or palm trees onto them.

Then came that one-legged running apparel, that “athletic negligee” of her own description, that had men’s eyeballs spinning like cherries in slot machines. For those who wonder, at the Olympics, each athlete must wear a uniform of, well, uniform design, which means that FloJo’s one-leggers will be modeled only in workouts.

“It’s a very cute outfit,” she says of the U.S. team’s garb. “Short pants, two kinds of tops. One has a hood, one doesn’t. But I brought some of my own styles to practice in.”

It was only recently that Griffith Joyner’s speed propelled her so far in front of the everyday pack. Four years back, she was a silver medalist in the Olympic 200 meters who still had to go to her secretarial job at a bank and still had to do fabulous things to her girlfriends’ hair to make ends meet.

Then, things happened. She met Al. She lost weight. She trained ferociously, two and three times a day, “three to four times harder than before,” as she put it.

Only then, as her successes grew, as she wowed the crowds at the U.S. Olympic trials, did the rest of FloJo’s physical makeup combine to make her unique, make her a conversation piece, make her somebody with a hook for everyday people to hang onto. “Oh, you mean the girl with the fingernails. Oh, you mean the woman with the one-legged suits.” People were talking about her, first coast to coast, then globally.

And now this. The world’s stage. The Olympics. Some who have only seen photographs and film of Griffith Joyner, in her Frederick’s of Hollywood warm-up clothes, in her elegant dresses and jewelry, on the cover of every magazine so far but Cosmopolitan and Mad, want to know more and more about her.

Maybe her place in the sun will be gone in a blink. Or maybe she is someone we will be talking about many Olympiads from now, the first million-dollar legs since Grable’s, the fastest woman working since Janet Guthrie, the most wondrous one since Lynda Carter.

Where Griffith Joyner goes from here is anyone’s guess. “I’ve already started competing and training for next year,” she says. “Whether or not I’ll go to Barcelona (for the 1992 Olympics) is still in question, but I have a lot left to accomplish.”

Younger athletes who see what she has accomplished, and the stylish way in which she has accomplished it, already have adopted Griffith Joyner as a role model. When one wonders if she is comfortable with that, Griffith Joyner says: “If it’s a positive, I don’t mind being a role model. Little girls come up to me and say, ‘I want to be just like you.’ I say, ‘Don’t want to be like me. Be better than me. Shoot higher.’ ”

With that, she excuses herself--excuse me, pardon me, excuse me--and tries to clear a pathway out of the room. The photographers are relentless. Not even FloJo’s speed can save her now. She is swept away in a sea of cameras, down a stairway, amid a mob, queen for a day, star of a show that hasn’t even started.