There can be no doubt who's Friday's Olympian. Heike Dreschler it is. She took the women's long jump gold with a 6.99 metres leap, with Fiona May taking silver with 6.92 while Marion, also 6.92, was beaten back to bronze on the basis of more fouls on the countback).

Half an inch short of six feet, the Karslruhe resident is a symbol of athletic versatility. A product of the now-tarnished East German sports system, Drechsler was the youngest ever athlete to win a gold at the Worlds (1983, at age 18). Since then, she has competed, and placed in the medals, in every Worlds with the exception of the last one, in 1999, when a leg injury forced her to pull out of a projected showdown with Marion Jones.

The seeds of her fame, though, were sown two years before that, in 1981 when she set a world junior record in the heptathlon. In 1983, the year of her triumph in the Worlds, she also set the world junior long jump record -- and it is yet to be broken.

In her career, she has now won 207 of the 246 long jump competitions she entered in, and jumped over seven metres more than 400 times.

Which is not bad going for someone who at one stage also held the world 200m record, and was ranked one of the world's best sprinters in the Eighties. At the 1988 Olympics, Drechsler won bronzes in the two sprints to go with a silver in the long jump.

As age caught up with her, injuries proliferated. She missed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics with a knee injury which in fact kept her out of action for most of the season. In 1997, just as she was recovering from the knee injury, she needed surgery on the Achilles' tendons of both her legs. A year later, she stormed back to win the IAAF World Cup -- in the process becoming the only athlete to defeat Marion Jones that year. In 1999 a leg injury forced her out of the Worlds, and a much aaited showdown with Marion Jones.

All of which formed the prelude to Sydney 2000 -- the crowning glory of an extraordinary athlete's career.