Felix Gains Notice in a Dash

Marion Jones did not compete in the Mt. San Antonio Relays for the first time in six years Saturday because she is expecting her first child in July, but spectators at the 45th running of the meet saw 17-year-old Allyson Felix of North Hills L.A. Baptist High take center stage on a warm, cloudless day.

Jones, the top-ranked women’s 100 and 200 sprinter in the world from 1997-2002, had run a national high school record of 22.58 seconds in the 200 to finish fourth in the 1992 Olympic trials in New Orleans shortly after her junior year at Thousand Oaks. But Felix lowered that mark by .07 of a second with a 22.51 effort that destroyed an invitational women’s field that included 1999 world champion Inger Miller, defending NCAA champion Natasha Mayers of USC and four-time NCAA 100 champion Angela Williams.

Felix, who has signed a letter of intent with USC, set a national high school indoor record of 23.14 in the 200 and advanced to the semifinals of the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham, England, last month. But she said earlier in the week that it might be too early in the season to challenge Jones’ mark.

It wasn’t.

Running in a white top with her nickname “Chicken Legs” printed on it, white shorts and white shoes, Felix got off to a good start while running in Lane 6, opened up a two- to three-meter lead coming off the turn and overpowered her older competitors in the home straightaway to better her previous best of 22.83 and post the second-fastest outdoor time in the world this year.

Mayers finished second in 23.00 and Miller was third in 23.04. Williams placed fifth in 23.81.

“I think the record had always been in the back of my head,” Felix said. “But I was just waiting for the right conditions and the right competition.”

The humble, soft-spoken Felix won the girls’ 100 in a wind-aided 11.24 during the high school portion of the Mt. SAC Relays on Friday, but her performance Saturday exceeded her expectations.

“I got a good warm-up before the race, but I wasn’t sure about anything,” she said. “But I definitely felt like I was going to have a good race.”

Jonathan Patton, who has coached Felix since her first competitive season as a L.A. Baptist freshman, wasn’t so sure. He feared he might have had Felix warm up too much before the race.

Felix, the defending state champion in the 100 and 200, said her performance will force her to rethink her goals for the rest of the season. But she isn’t concerned about the comparisons to Jones, who won three gold medals and two bronzes in the 2000 Olympic Games at Sydney.

“I don’t really worry about it,” Felix said. “I definitely have a lot of respect for her. But I just want to go out and do my own race.”

Americans Maurice Greene and Kenta Bell and Jamaican Kamel Thompson had the most noteworthy performances in the men’s meet; Americans Kelli White and Anna Norgren-Mahon turned in other noteworthy efforts in the women’s.

Greene, the 2000 Olympic and three-time defending world champion in the 100, was coming off a disappointing 2002 season in which he had lost his world record in the 100 to fellow American Tim Montgomery and been beaten repeatedly during the second half of the European circuit.

But he won the 200 in 20.16 at Mt. SAC after running a strong anchor leg on an HSI 400-meter relay team that finished second to a U.S. national team that clocked 38.52, the fastest time in the world this year.

Afterward, Greene said he would win the 100 and 200 in the World Championships in Paris in August and his rhetoric really heated up when someone asked him if his attitude was different this year because he was no longer the “World’s Fastest Human.”

“The clock says he ran the fastest time ever,” Greene said about Montgomery’s 9.78 clocking in Paris that nipped Greene’s 9.79 time from 1999. “He never won the World Championships. He never won an Olympic gold medal. They didn’t start calling me the fastest man when I broke the world record. It was when I won my World Championship title and then I won another World Championship title and I was called the fastest man in the world because of my titles, my World Championships and my Olympics.... Just because you have the world record, it doesn’t mean you’re the fastest man in the world. It just means you have the fastest time in the world.”

Bell won his second consecutive triple jump title with a 56-foot 9 1/2-inch jump that tied the yearly world-leading mark he set a week earlier in El Paso.

Thompson won the 400 hurdles in a career-best and world-leading 48.52 while defeating second-place Chris Rawlinson of Great Britain and third-place Joey Woody of the U.S.

Woody was ranked fifth in the world last year and Rawlinson was ranked ninth.

White, the bronze medalist in the women’s 200 in the 2001 World Championships, won the 100 in a career-best 10.97.

Norgren-Mahon, the U.S. record holder in the women’s hammer at 236-3, won that event with a toss of 234-0.