Marion Jones - "i Want To Be An Olympic Champion"

Marion Lois Jones was born October 12, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of George and Marion Jones. Her mother, a medical and legal secretary, had immigrated to the United States from Belize. When Jones was an infant, her parents divorced, leaving her mother to raise her and her older half-brother, Albert Kelly, alone. In 1983, Mrs. Jones married Ira Toler, whose death four years later of a stroke was a devastating loss to young Marion and her brother.

Jones played T-ball and soccer and took ballet, gymnastics, and tap dancing lessons. By age seven she was participating in organized track events, and by the sixth grade she was playing basketball. In 1984, she was deeply impressed by track stars Florence Griffith-Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Evelyn Ashford, and Carl Lewis as she watched the Olympic Games on television. She wrote on her blackboard at home, "I want to be an Olympic Champion." Jones later said, "I just always believed it was in my future to compete in the Olympics. I knew from about age five that someday I would do something special in life."