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Lolo Jones win the 60m hurdles and $ 25k from Visa at the 2008 USA Indoor Championship.

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By John Powers
Globe Staff / February 23, 2008
She remembers the head-scratching when people would see Lori Jones on the entry list for the hurdles. "They'd say, who is this girl and why is she running this time?" Lolo Jones says. "Where's Lolo? Why is Lolo not coming?"

The confusion went back to her childhood days in Des Moines, where mother and daughter had the same first name. "People would call the house," she recalls, "and it was, 'You want to speak to Big Lo or Baby Lo?' "

So she became Lolo, which Jones thinks is a cool name. "Sounds like a news reporter, doesn't it?" she says. "Lolo Jones at the scene of the crime."

Tomorrow afternoon, Jones will be at the scene at the Reggie Lewis Center for the USA Indoor Track & Field Championships to defend her title and there'll be no confusion about who's in the blocks. The public address announcer will make sure of that.

"When you line up at every track meet, the one thing they do before you run is, they go through your stats," says Jones, who is second to Gail Devers (with a clocking of 7.77 seconds) on the all-time US indoor list. "Before then, I had no stats. You can say, fourth-place finisher at USA, sixth place at Worlds, but until you're a national champion, that's when you start to turn heads."

Besides defending her crown, Jones will be bidding for a place on the US team for next month's world meet in Valencia, Spain, the next stop on the road to Olympus, which literally tripped her up four years ago.

Jones was just out of Louisiana State that summer with an outside shot at making the three-woman team for Athens in the 100-meter hurdles. But when she found herself running shoulder to shoulder in the semis with Joanna Hayes, who went on to win the Games, Jones was so startled that she lost concentration, hit the ninth hurdle, and took herself out of it. "That was a juvenile mistake," Jones acknowledges. "If I'd just kept going, kept running my race, I would have been fine."

Her slipup sent Jones into an emotional and financial tailspin. "It was a bad summer because you had to watch everybody compete in what you want to be your dream," she says. "And the fall was hard because the motivation was gone."

Missing the team meant no shoe contract and no cash. "The companies only want to sponsor people who make that Olympic team," Jones says. "If you don't make the team, they'll see you in a year. Basically, you mean nothing to them."

So Jones, who was working two minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet, began spending days in church, questioning why she was still running. "Is this what I need to be doing with my life?" she asked herself. "I have a college degree, I can go work at a company and get paid a salary."

But a second place in her professional debut overseas the next winter turned everything around. Nike signed her (she's with Asics now) and Jones began dropping her times and climbing in the domestic outdoor rankings, from 10th to fifth to fourth to third.

Last summer, she made the team for the world outdoor meet in Osaka, Japan, where Jones finished a creditable sixth and relearned a lesson. Nothing is guaranteed in a footrace, especially a footrace with fences.

In the hurdles, you can be having a gold-medal run, snag a spike on the final set of sticks, and end up facefirst on the track with the rest of the world passing you by. Yet Jones had been told that if you make the US team in the event, you're a lock for a global medal.

"I had the third-fastest time in the world going in, so I 'knew' I was going to get a medal," she says. "But I let the distractions get to me. All the other girls had PBs [personal bests] in the final. I should have had a PB."

Thus continued Jones's postgraduate education, much of which takes place overseas, where indoor hurdlers can race twice a week instead of twice a season, as they do in the States. The European circuit, which bounces from Scotland to Sweden to Germany to England to Poland, is good training for the unpredictability of the hurdles. "Being prepared for the random thing," Jones says. "You get used to the surprises."

It was in Karlsruhe, Germany, where Jones ran her 7.77 two weekends ago, when Sweden's Susanna Kallur set a world record (7.68). Unless you get Eurosport, though, you probably didn't see it. But it was a career marker for Jones, who's looking for another one tomorrow.

"Athletes will fight for a title even if it doesn't mean making an Olympic team," says Jones, who ranks behind Michelle Perry and Ginnie Powell outdoors. "Just to have the right to say, 'I am the US champion.' It's bragging rights."

In July, though, the outdoor title won't mean as much as a place on the team for Beijing, which is tougher for the 100-meter hurdlers than it is for any other runners. One race, one shot. "You hear the 100 [meter] people who messed up saying, 'Well, I got sixth, I got a spot on the relay,' " says Jones. "I'm like, can we make a shuttle hurdle relay team? When's that going to come back in style?"

Source: The Boston Globe