JOANNA HAYES
 American Joanna Hayes celebrates her victory Tuesday in the women's 100-meter hurdles. She set an Olympic record by winning in 12.37 seconds. (Eric Feferberg AFP/Getty Images) |
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ATHENS, Greece - They stretched, they leaned, they reached out desperately into the sweet, sultry evening breeze with every last ounce of energy. But American Joanna Hayes and Canadian Perdita Felicien, both gold medal favorites, were going in totally opposite directions.
In the finals of the women's 100-meter hurdles Tuesday, they combined to create human athletic drama: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
For Felicien, it was the worst moment of her competitive life, a Did Not Finish in the 2004 Athens Olympics. Fifteen meters from the start, one of her ruby-red spiked slippers crashed into the center of the first hurdle, nearly splitting it. She plunged onto the track, dragging down Russia's Irena Shevchenko, who was on her right in lane six.
You could see her reaching ... leaning ... grasping ... all to no avail.
For Hayes, it was the most exhilarating 12.37 seconds of her competitive life. She blazed down the track and was rewarded with an Olympic record and an Olympic gold medal for beating Ukrainian Olena Krasovska (12.45) and American Melissa Morrison (12.56).
She bounded across the finish line, then joyfully reached for the sky.
The 75,000 spectators gasped in one breath, then cheered in another.
Hayes, who spent much of June and July training in suburban St. Louis with Bobby and Jackie Joyner Kersee, danced and pranced and skipped around the track, wrapped in the stars and stripes. With blissful tears streaming down from under her dark sunglasses onto her cheeks, she waved to all the flag-waving spectators and posed for all the photographers who raced behind her.
Unlike other American medal winners, Hayes never bothered to try to be cool and dispassionate. She practically bubbled and floated on her victory lap. She laughed. She cried. Then she laughed some more. She acted like this was the greatest day of her life.
Of course, it was.
"Oh boy, this feels soooo good, better than I imagined," she said, beaming, after the race, clinging to a small American flag in her hand, wearing a larger one like a patriotic shawl. "I know (the USOC) wants us to be low-key and all, but I'm sorry, you only get one chance to run that victory lap. I have no idea if I'll ever have another Olympic moment, so hey, I told myself last night, 'If you get the chance, enjoy it.'"
Just as compelling as Hayes' ecstasy was Felicien's gut-wrenching agony.
Another throng of photographers had hustled to surround Felicien, who trained at the University of Illinois.
They captured her slow-motion, agonizing, uncontrollable stumble.
If it seemed like torture to watch it, this is what it was must have been like inside Felicien's panicked mind:
"Go, go, go ... react ... recover ... You're NOT ... GOING ... TO ... FALL!"
But of course she did.
But moments later, in an amazing moment of character, Felicien stood before a flock of Canadian and American reporters and answered every question. She dipped and soared through the entire spectrum of human emotion. She was stunned, dazed, distraught and defiant all at the same time.
"For my end to come down like this?" she said, shaking her head and wiping a tear from her eye. "That's not my destiny, that's not my fate."
Then, without catching her breath or pausing for any emotional emphasis: "I'm going home and bawl my eyes out. But you better believe they'll have a force to be reckoned with for the next four years. The only satisfaction I'll ever get now is to break the world record. That's what I'm setting my sights on. I'm not going down like this again."
And then she was gone.
Every step of the way, as she slowly walked down the long corridor under the stadium, Felicien was stopped and given a hug by some runner in a different country's uniform.
It reminded you again that the Olympics really are about the joy of competition and the bonds of friendship. It sounds so corny, so saccharine, so melodramatic when you hear it uttered in some Olympic documentary.
But the up-close and personal exposure gives you a warm and hopeful feeling.
Only 24 hours earlier, Hayes had showed exactly what that Olympic spirit means. In her swift semifinal victory, Hayes flew over the final hurdle, her eyes riveted towards the finish line.
She was oblivious to everything but her world, her moment, her race. And as she crossed the line to win, she glanced up at the giant stadium scoreboard. It was the fastest of the day and only 0.10 seconds off the Olympic record, so she erupted in a joyful celebration of smiles, hand claps and fist pumps.
But as she turned back toward the straightaway, Hayes caught a glimpse of German hurdler Kirsten Bolm, who had pulled her hamstring muscle as she was clearing the ninth hurdle and was lying in the fetal position on the edge of the track.
Hayes stopped celebrating and raced to Bolm's side. She held Bolm's hand, rubbed her arm, wiped away the tears streaming down Bolm's face, then whispered comforting words.
"I felt so awful," Hayes said. "Here I was all excited, and there she was laying there hurt."
For anyone who saw this, a natural reaction would be, "Oh, they must be old friends."
"No," Hayes said. "We actually only met a few weeks ago (Aug. 8) at a meet in Munich. But she was such a nice person, and we became quick friends. All I wanted to do was try and comfort her, try to tell her that things would get better."
Twenty-four hours later, as Joanna Hayes skipped on a cloud with Olympic gold draped around her neck, we had all the confirmation we needed that nice guys don't always finish last.
