Rivals Make the Long Jump to Admiration : Track and field: Joyner-Kersee, Drechsler share kinship despite cultural differences and very competitive rivalry.

For so long, their gestures said what their words could not.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee spoke no German. Heike Drechsler spoke little English, and even if she had known the language, the restraints of the former East German sports system permitted her little freedom to talk with Western competitors. But, somehow, Joyner-Kersee and Drechsler found ways to express their mutual admiration.

“You can communicate a lot with your eyes and your body,” Joyner-Kersee said.

One would nod. The other would smile. From those silent but eloquent gestures, Joyner-Kersee, raised in the gritty neighborhoods of East St. Louis, and Drechsler, from the small German town of Jena, forged a kinship that enhances their rivalry and enriches their lives.

“Over the years, going through the Grand Prix circuit, you get to know each other and you make small talk--just us, not in front of a crowd in a stadium,” said Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic gold medalist in the heptathlon and long jump in 1988 and again in the heptathlon in 1992. “It’s just talk, nothing she would be uncomfortable about or I would be uncomfortable about.

“We have remained the same. If she wins, it wouldn’t be a situation where I wouldn’t talk to her, and if I won, it wouldn’t be a thing where she would not talk to me. That’s the good thing about us. I can go up against people, and they become cocky, but not her. We respect one another.”

When Drechsler, the two-time world champion and 1992 Olympic champion in the long jump, began considering entering the heptathlon last summer for the first time in 13 years, she confided in Joyner-Kersee. When Drechsler recorded a 1994 world-best score of 6,741 points at Talence, France, Joyner-Kersee wasn’t surprised. Instead, she was delighted, anticipating Drechsler would push her to greater heights as Joyner-Kersee points toward another heptathlon triumph at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta.

“It gave me new life and new energy,” Joyner-Kersee said. “It’s refreshing. There’s no telling what she could do.”

And there’s no telling what they might accomplish in the long jump tonight in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden.

They’ve had a stranglehold on the world rankings for the last dozen years, with Drechsler ranking first eight times and Joyner-Kersee three times. The only time neither ranked first was 1989, when they didn’t compete in the event.

Joyner-Kersee, 32, holds the American long jump records indoors (23 feet 4 3/4 inches) and outdoors (24-7). She defeated Drechsler in five of their six meetings last season, but this will be their first indoor confrontation in three years.

“I know when Heike Drechsler is going to be in a competition, I’d better be in some kind of shape because it’s going to go all day,” Joyner-Kersee said.

Drechsler, who turned 30 in December, set the world indoor long jump record twice during the 1987 Millrose Games. A year later, she surpassed that in Germany with a jump of 24-2 1/4, still a record. Her personal best outdoors is 24-6 1/2, the third-best ever.

Although she prefers to jump outdoors--and remembers frantically searching for the right spikes to use on the Garden’s wooden floor in 1987--the lure of competing against Joyner-Kersee brought Drechsler to New York.

“It’s important to have a good jump, but my motivation is good because she is there,” Drechsler said. “It is difficult in Germany because there is no competition, and Jackie Joyner is in America. . . . You must go to where the people are to bring (yourself to produce) good results.”

Drechsler isn’t sure if she will compete in the heptathlon in the World Championships at Goteborg, Sweden, in August. She won the world junior heptathlon title in 1981, when she was 16, but she dropped it to concentrate on the long jump. Boredom with her training inspired her to try it again last September, but the long jump remains her focus.

“It was fun for me,” she said. “I never was sure I was that good, but now I know and I am glad about it. It is more difficult now than when you do it for fun. Now people think you are good, and you have to do well. I have to see how it goes with the organization (at the World Championships). It would be nice, but I have to think also of my long jump. Maybe I can find another event, like the 400 meters. I like track and field. It doesn’t matter what event.”

Joyner-Kersee hopes Drechsler competes in both events through 1996.

“For me, my goal is to make the 1996 Olympic team and to know from this point on there is another athlete as talented as I am to compete with, that’s good for me,” she said. “If she’s doing the heptathlon, I’ve got to stay on top of everything.”