Relaxed Nature of Relays Enhances Fan Experience

Within seconds after Marion Jones won the 400 meters Sunday at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays with the fourth-fastest time by an American woman, the announcement came over the public address system that her shoes had been donated for the raffle. Fans immediately began to queue up. It was the only time all day that the line for the raffle was longer than for In-N-Out Burger.

You can’t help but love the Mt. SAC Relays if you’re a track and field fan. It’s like going to a Dodger game at Holman Stadium in Vero Beach.

There’s history. The list of meet record holders at the entrance to Hilmer Lodge Stadium includes names such as Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Evelyn Ashford, Edwin Moses, Renaldo Nehemiah, Willie Banks, Merlene Ottey, Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon.

There’s ambience. The stadium sits in a valley surrounded by hills turned lush by winter rains. Sheep graze on one. The track is lined by palm trees and pine trees. The concession stands are out of a county fair. One of them this year, Panama Joe’s, offered hair styling and hot links.

The atmosphere is relaxed, even among most of the athletes, like spring training before the real season of lucrative European meets and, in years such as this one, the Olympic trials and Olympics.

The organizers in years past, before Scott Davis took over as meet director a couple of years ago, were not exactly organized. Often, athletes who were expected to compete didn’t, and, sometimes, athletes who weren’t expected to compete did.

One year when he was the announcer, Davis was as surprised as anyone to look down on the track from the press box and see world-class sprinter Dennis Mitchell in the blocks. Then he noticed that Calvin Smith, a former world-record holder, also was in the race. No one had told Davis.

That’s the Mt. SAC Relays.

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Then you have a day like Sunday.

One moment the Bleacher Bums, the guys who have been coming to Mt. SAC for all 42 years and sit in packs above the finish line, are complaining about the admission price. “The people who run this meet should be filling the seats, not their pockets,” one gripes. The next moment they’re thinking that $18 is a bargain for seeing a performance they won’t forget for a long time.

C.J. Hunter, Jones’ husband, saw it coming.

Davis approached the world champion shotputter after he won his event with an impressive throw of 71 feet 4 inches and said, “That was a great mark.”

“Hold on,” Hunter told him. “There’s another great mark to come.”

Jones delivered with a time of 49.59 seconds. That was considerably faster than her best time of 50.36, the best time by anyone in the event since 1998 and would have won last year’s World Championships in Seville, Spain.

It was intended to send a message to coaches who will select the U.S. 1,600 relay team for the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

Jones, in her quest to become the first track and field athlete to win five gold medals in the same Olympics, is a prohibitive favorite to qualify for the U.S. team during the trials in July in Sacramento in the 100, 200, long jump and sprint relay.

But, because she doesn’t plan to run another open 400 this year, she hoped that her performance here would convince coaches that she also is one of the nation’s best quarter-milers for the metric mile relay. If you think this guarantees her a berth on the team, you don’t know the history of U.S. relay coaches. But they’d have to be particularly daft not to choose her.

So Marionmania officially has begun Down Under.

“She’s absolutely going to be the big story in Australia,” said Robert Lusetich, the L.A. correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney-based national newspaper, The Australia, who covered the meet Sunday.

“She’s a supernova. She has that brilliance about her. Every four years, there is that one memorable, lasting performance that defines the Olympics. Marion Jones is likely to provide it for Sydney.”

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Did Jones also send a message to Inger Miller?

Miller, formerly of Pasadena Muir and USC, finished second to Jones in the 100 last summer in Seville, won the 200 after Jones withdrew because of a back injury and informed reporters that they were no longer covering a “one-woman show.”

Jones heard, but said Sunday that it never entered her mind when she learned Miller would challenge her in the 400 at Mt. SAC.

Sure, it didn’t.

Meantime, Miller’s teammates with HSInternational were more concerned about her state of mind.

“A lot depends on today,” Boldon said before the meet. “She’s very cerebral. If it’s not good [today], we’ll be spending until July trying to get her confidence back up.”

But she didn’t seem all that shaken after finishing last, more than five seconds behind Jones in 55.21.

She said she spent much of Wednesday posing for Sports Illustrated.

“I had to run about a million turns for them,” she said. “My legs were dead.”

Besides, she said, her goals for this season did not include winning the 400 at Mt. SAC. She’s more interested in the 100 and 200 in Sydney.

“This was a workout,” she said. “If I win a gold medal, I don’t think I’ll look back to Mt. SAC in April and say I wish I’d won that 400.”

It’s only spring training.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com