Athletics: The World's Fastest Woman

"I never wanted to be Marion Jones or Flo-Jo or anyone like that," the world's fastest woman insists. Her laugh starts off sounding warm and giggly but ends up echoing the determined steeliness which drove her to victory in last Monday night's world championship 100m final in Helsinki. Lauryn Williams is very small, very friendly and very different from Jones and Florence Griffith Joyner - those taller, flashier and grander icons whose downfall helped infuse an entire sport with doubt and notoriety.

"I was never that interested in them because I'm not the kind of girl to have idols on the track. I've always just wanted to be Lauryn. I feel that more than ever because I really don't think one race should change your life. I just want to keep on being me. Does that make sense?"

In the murky world of sprinting, where drug-filled intrigue and outright cheating have besmirched a primal skill that was once so pure and compelling, Williams' clean break from the past is not only sensible, it could yet rescue the drama of the 100m from the laboratory and the courtroom and return it to the track.

On a stormy night in Helsinki, with the rain lashing the runners, Williams led from gun to tape as, despite being only 5ft 2in, she powered down the slick straight ahead of Jamaica's Veronica Campbell and the more elegant but mentally fragile favourite, Christine Arron from France. The 21-year-old Williams had become world champion - with Yuliya Nesterenko, the controversial Belarus sprinter who had denied her Olympic gold a year ago, finishing last.

It is significant that Williams, also a winner in the 4x100m relay on Saturday, now uses her victory to make a statement of larger intent - especially as seven previous 100m world champions have been involved in doping allegations. "There's been so much bad stuff that I hope me and a bunch of my team-mates can bring back some innocence to the sport. I prefer to concentrate on what we're doing but the controversy did a lot of damage. It made me wonder why I turned pro but you have to be true to yourself.

"And when I look at the people around me I see nothing of that bad past. I like to think that, being world champions, me and Justin Gatlin [the 23-year-old American who won the 100m and 200m in Helsinki] can change the image of sprinting. Hopefully people will look at us as young kids and say we're doing really well, we're clean and we're having fun. We should start taking over from the drugs issue."

Williams' desire to move on from the old drug saga is highlighted by the blunt way in which she dismisses the mysterious case of Nesterenko - who arrived in Athens last year with a world ranking of 113. Her surprise win in the 100m final was overshadowed by the absence of at least four supposedly great runners. Jones failed to qualify amid accusations about her association with the drug-makers of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. The reigning world champion Kelli White, her American team-mate Torri Edwards and Ekaterina Thanou, the Greek sprinter who had finished second behind Jones in the Sydney Olympics, had all been banned.

Nesterenko ran far quicker than ever before but the shock of victory was followed by a more puzzling vanishing act. Rather than capitalising on her success and proving her worth as the new queen of the track, Nesterenko disappeared. It then emerged that she had failed a drugs test in 2002 and had escaped a ban only because the Polish testing lab was not accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

She finally appeared at a meeting in Oregon earlier this year and ran 100m in 11.47sec - more than half a second slower than her winning Olympic run. When pressed to comment on Nesterenko's erratic times and inconsistent appearances, Williams admits that "I had never heard of her before Athens. But I don't wonder too much about her or anyone else. I'm trying to focus on myself."

Yet, if it had not been for Nesterenko, Williams would have an Olympic title to set alongside her new world championship. "You know, at first, I was excited to get silver. But then I had a few days when I was in a deep funk about it. I had come second to someone who came from out of nowhere. And, more than that, second in most races means nothing. But then a few people spoke to me and ever since then I've been very happy with my silver medal."

Even allowing for the rain Williams' time in Helsinki, 10.93, is notably slower than the 10.70 Jones ran to retain her world 100m crown six years ago. Jones's own personal best, 10.65, is also adrift of the implausible and still current world record Griffith Joyner set at the US Olympic trials in 1988 - 10.49. Flo-Jo's changed physique and astonishing improvement as a sprinter that year was followed by her early retirement soon after mandatory out-of-competition testing was implemented in 1992. Her subsequent death at the age of 38 raised further questions about her possible use of steroids.

Flo-Jo's dazzling, if probably chemically enhanced, running at the Seoul Olympics [where Ben Johnson tested positive for drugs after the men's 100m final] inspired a teenage girl. "I want to be an Olympic champion," the 13-year-old Marion Jones wrote on her classroom blackboard in 1988.

And Griffith Joyner was also indirectly responsible for Williams' discovery of her own talent. "I was 10 years old [in 1994] and me and my dad were at the Carnegie Science Centre in Pittsburgh. There was this silhouette of Flo-Jo which flashed up and down a short track outside the building and kids were encouraged to race it. I started running against it and wouldn't quit until I won. I don't know how long I raced against that shadow but I finally beat it. It was then that my dad decided to get me into a track programme."

Donna Williams - who began to call her daughter Flash rather than Lauryn - was equally convinced. "My mom loves to tell this story about me trying to outrun our German Shepherd. He was called Ben and I just about wore that dog out before I also beat him one day."

This, however, was no definitive love affair between a young girl and running. Williams was more interested in "trying to work out what I might be truly good at. I did ballroom dancing, gymnastics, karate - but I really wanted to be a great basketball player. That was my ambition but, being so short, I wasn't that good."

Shuttling back and forth between her estranged parents - her father suffered from leukaemia in Rochester, a small town in Pennsylvania, while her mother worked as a school-teacher in Detroit - Williams learnt to become adaptable. "It was weird because Detroit is tough inner-city life and we lived in an African-American neighbourhood. But then in Penn- sylvania I was the only African-American girl in my graduate class. That helped prepare me for all the different situations you get in the big outside world."

Life, then, was far from glamorous. "Yeah," Williams laughs, "I worked at Wendy's, flipping burgers. I started a week after I turned 16 and I worked there all through my senior year. Then that summer I went over to the other side and got a job at Subway. I wasn't even dreaming about making it on the track. My main priority was to get into college and I guess that's when it kicked in. We needed money for college fees and I knew a track scholarship would really help."

Williams flourished at the University of Miami and her Olympic success vindicated her parents' faith. They have been duly repaid, in terms of both raw excitement and enduring pride, with a world champion daughter. "When I won last Monday I had to go through a drugs test and then face the media for the first couple of hours and so my agent called my family. By the time I was free there were so many messages on my phone. And when I spoke to them they were yelling and screaming with happiness."

Such joy replaces the anguish which has shrouded her father's 14-year battle with leukaemia. Unable to work and on dialysis while waiting for a kidney transplant, David Williams still managed to drive his daughter from one obscure junior track meet to another. "I didn't really know how sick he was when I was younger. He was such a strong person that he tried not to show the illness, but then of course there were some days when he was so sick he couldn't do anything.

"But he's doing pretty good now. There's this new kind of dialysis which means he doesn't have to go down to the clinic three times a week. He's still waiting for a transplant but life's a lot more convenient. I can't wait to see him this week when we meet up in Zurich."

They will then travel to Sheffield for the Norwich Union British Grand Prix. Williams has chosen to run the 200m next Sunday against the new world champion Allyson Felix - her 19-year-old team-mate. "I'm not really a 200m runner," Williams cautions of their intriguing clash, "but I'm hoping to match her winning time [of 22.17sec] in Helsinki. I'm not ready to do a whole series of 200m runs but I'm capable of one really quick round - and I'd love that to happen in Sheffield. Who knows? By the time of the 2012 Olympics in London, I might be chasing both the 100m and 200m. I'll be 28 and near my prime."

Before then Williams plans to "try and restore the credibility of track and field. Justin Gatlin and me should get together and generate as much good publicity as we can. I know Justin really well and we're hoping to work together. We face a problem in America because, with our sport, only the bad stuff seems to make the news. We'd like to change that."

Williams' first suggestion, when asked how she proposes to start this regeneration, is suitably American. "I want to get on Oprah. Yeah! I think her show sends out a real positive message and it reaches across the whole of America - and the world. So to talk on Oprah about all the good stuff in track would be awesome."

And surely Wendy's or Subway will offer a juicy contract after all those bleak years she spent dishing up fast food on their behalf? Williams yelps with laughter. "I deserve that! Oh, I would love to open my email tonight and see they're making me some big offer. I did enough work for them."

Williams, of course, also has loftier goals. Apart from building a legacy as "a dominant sprinter" she is considering "my life beyond the track. It's strange to be in a job which doesn't require you to use your brain much, but I read a lot and I'm always looking for what I might do with the rest of my life. I studied finance at college but I'm also interested in social work. Maybe I could do something where I supply mortgages for low-income families. I want to help people. I'd like to be a philanthropist."

Philanthropy is not a word associated much with Florence Griffith Joyner or Marion Jones but it falls naturally from the mouth of their more appealing successor. It is easy to believe that Lauryn Williams, cleaner and stronger than those who have fallen before her, will help lift sprinting from its knees. A bright new era might have just begun.