BEIJING -- The coach knew there was something wrong. He could tell sometimes by the way Lori "Lolo" Jones dressed. Or by how she no longer had the bike she rode to practice. Or by how she didn't want to be dropped off right in front of her house when he gave her a ride home.
The woman who one day would take in Jones sensed it the same way. She had given Jones rides to visit her mother and never was invited into the house. She noticed Jones paid little attention to parts of her appearance, like hair, that preoccupy many teenage girls.
Both the coach, Phil Ferguson, and the friend, Janis Caldwell, say they never knew the whole story, never knew exactly how disjointed Jones' life had been.
"She never really talked about how bad a situation she was in," Ferguson said. "The only time she did was when she was going to be homeless."
In a sense, Jones was homeless the first 18 years of her life in Des Moines, bouncing from apartment to apartment, school to school, because her single mother had five kids and no money for the rent. They lived a while in the basement of a church, an arrangement Jones made an effort to hide.
Her family moved so often, Jones said, that she went to a different school every year until she reached high school. Her father was in and out of jail. Her sister moved to live with a grandmother in Texas.
"We were definitely not as close as most families," she said.
She would be the only kid on the Des Moines Area Youth Track Club or the Roosevelt High School team without a parent around to cheer her.
Through it all, Jones kept her grades up and played the cello in the high school orchestra and became a good enough high hurdler to be named Gatorade Midwest High School Athlete of the Year. Through it all, the turmoil and rootlessness, one goal never shifted.
"I wanted to get out of poverty," she said.
At 26, Lolo Jones has done that and so much more. And even if she has provided only basic details of her journey to those who knew her well, the big picture is clear.
The obstacles Jones cleared to get to the 2008 Olympics were a lot more formidable than the 33-inch barriers she will hurdle next week.
Jones has the world's fastest time this year in the 100-meter hurdles, a 12.45 from the semifinals of the U.S. Olympic trials. She won the final in a wind-aided 12.29, a time bettered by only one woman in history under any conditions.
