Electronic Telegraph Friday 22 September 2000 Patrick Bishop REACHING for a thesaurus to find the right words to describe the character of Marie José Pérec, the French come up with "whimsical, crazy, individualistic, narcissistic, anti-social". They love her for the gold medals and the glory they bring France.They disapprove of her for turning her back on the mother country and for what they see as her unashamed pursuit of money. France likes to see a little patriotism in its sports stars, but she has never played the game. Nowadays she barely qualifies as French, having left in 1994 to train under John Smith, in California. At the beginning of the year she took the bizarre step of moving to Rostock in what was East Germany to make her Olympic preparations with Wolfgang Meier, who presided over the steroid-soaked success of the GDR's glory days. Nonetheless, she was until her sudden departure, France's most glamorous representative at the Olympics. Now she has gone too far. Henri Serandour, the president of the French Olympic committee, said: "All these big stars ought to remember where they came from." Pérec, in fact, comes from Basse-Terre, on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. She discovered her gift when - already five feet 10 inches tall at 13 - she regularly trounced the boys when racing along the sands. She came to notice during the Seoul games in 1988 as much for a bust-up with a female team-mate as for her athletic achievments. After winning the 400-metre gold medal in Barcelona in 1992 she found the adulation stifling. Her desire for solitude did not prevent her signing a £500,000 deal with Reebok, the sportswear manufacturers, or modelling for Paco Rabanne. In 1998 she was struck by the rare Epstein-Barr virus. Her career seemed to be over but she recovered and returned to the track. Now she is running again, though not in the way she intended. Eamonn Condon WWW.RunnersGoal.com
