"She has a tremendous drive to do well, to be a champion, to succeed," said Ferguson, the coach. "You could tell that even when she was young."
It is the kind of drive that led her to work a string of part-time jobs to continue her sports career after graduating from Louisiana State, when she did not have the track record to attract a large shoe company contract. She wondered whether it was time to move on to a full-time job outside sports.
She pushed credit cards to the limit. On sweltering, 100-degree days, she told friends that her apartment's air conditioning was broken. The embarrassing truth was she couldn't afford it.
"When I didn't make the 2004 Olympic team, I started wondering if I should pursue track and field or use my economics degree," she said. "It was very hard, but I'm sure I'm not the only athlete who has been through that."
Jones had reached an earlier crossroads after her freshman year at Theodore Roosevelt High School. Her mother was moving to a small town near Mason City, Iowa. Jones wanted to stay at Roosevelt.
"I wanted solid ground for the future," she said. "My main goal was not track but college. I wanted to be the first in my family to graduate college."
Ferguson stepped in, arranging for her to live with a Des Moines family so she could stay at Roosevelt. Jones would live with three different families, winding up with the Caldwells her senior year.
"I told her she didn't have to pay any rent, that she could just go to school and go to track practice," Caldwell said. "But she kept working at a coffee shop to have a little money of her own."
Jones was planning to go to Iowa State. But she long had admired Caldwell's goddaughter, elite hurdler Kim Carson, an All-American and national champion at LSU. Carson helped get LSU Coach Dennis Shaver interested in Jones.
It was Shaver who eventually persuaded Jones to continue running after she failed to make the hurdles final at the 2004 Olympic trials.
"I'll see you at practice tomorrow," Shaver said to Jones after she told him of her plans to retire. Now she is in the second year of a contract with Asics, the reigning world indoor hurdles champion and a strong contender for an Olympic medal.
"It has come over time," she said.
In Baton Rouge, Jones has found the stability she long has sought -- a place, as she puts it, "to ground my feet."
When Jones returned to Des Moines for this year's Drake Relays, she gave each girl on the Roosevelt High team a pair of spikes and the school a check for $3,000 that will be used to repair the track and buy hurdles. She later gave her $4,000 prize money from the Olympic trials to a fund for a single mother who was a victim of the recent Iowa floods.
For Lolo Jones, staying grounded obviously has never been a problem.
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Philip Hersh covers Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.
