Track and Field : With No Time to Train, FloJo Decides to Retire

Florence Griffith Joyner, whose electrifying sprint times and spectacular racing outfits dazzled the track and field world last year, will announce her retirement today.

Griffith Joyner, who has been capitalizing on her 1988 success by signing several commercial endorsements worth more than $1 million and has received numerous other offers which she is pondering--deals that could be worth more millions--will make her announcement at a news conference this morning, it was learned Friday.

She reportedly will retire because of all the time-consuming interests outside track and field and because she has been unable to devote time to training.

For the 1988 season, and particularly the Olympics, Griffith Joyner, 29, trained extremely hard, and it paid off with three gold medals and one silver at the Seoul Games and two world records.

At Seoul, she won the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, and ran on the winning 400-meter relay team and the second-place 1,600-meter relay team.

Her winning time in the 200 was 21.34 seconds, shattering the world record of 21.56 she had set in the semifinals. Prior to the Games, the record was 21.71, so her achievement of lowering the record by .37 of a second in such a short space of time was astonishing.

It was similar to her performance in the U.S. Olympic trials at Indianapolis in July, when she reduced the world record in the 100 meters from 10.76 to 10.49--a drop of .27 of a second.

No sprinter--man or woman--ever had broken a sprint record by such a huge margin.

“We weren’t looking for this,” Al Joyner, her husband and 1984 Olympic triple jump champion, said this week in New York, where Griffith Joyner received the Jesse Owens International Trophy Award, given to the world’s outstanding athlete in an amateur sport. “We didn’t expect her to become America’s sweetheart. You can’t plan for that. It’s a dream come true.

“It hasn’t hit her what she’s done . . . what she’s achieved. Possibly it will hit her when she’s 60.”

After her Olympic success, Griffith Joyner did not compete again outdoors and has skipped the entire 1989 indoor season. Her first outdoor race was scheduled May 10 at Tokyo, where she was to run 400 meters.

Shotputter Randy Barnes, who had to borrow $80 cab fare to get to his competition, and triple jumper Michael Conley, with his customary last-ditch effort, won titles Friday at the Mobil Indoor Track and Field Championships.

Barnes won with a modest throw of 68 feet 6 inches. But he was late arriving for the competition at Princeton because he missed the 8 a.m. bus taking the shotputters from New York to the campus.

Conley, on the only one in which he touched the toeboard, soared 56-10, edging Charlie Simpkins, who had been the leader at 56-6 3/4.