THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 13 : Joyner-Kersee Leaps to Her Second Gold

Perhaps the best U.S. woman athlete since Babe Didrikson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee performed more like Babe Ruth. She didn’t call her shot Thursday, but her husband did.

Before Joyner-Kersee’s next-to-last attempt in the long jump final at the Olympic Stadium, Bob Kersee, who also is her coach, yelled to her, “You have a 7.40 in you.”

In imperial measurement, that equals 24 feet 3 1/2 inches.

Considering that was 9 1/2 inches better than the best of her previous four jumps, and that she had been having difficulty coordinating her steps on the runway, it took quite a leap of faith for Kersee to tell her that she could jump that far.

But Joyner-Kersee is quite a leaper.

She jumped exactly 24-3 1/2 to become the first U.S. woman ever to win the Olympic long jump competition, finishing well ahead of East German Heike Drechsler, who was second at 23-8 1/2, and the Soviet Union’s Galina Chistyakova, who was third at 23-4.

Joyner-Kersee’s clincher also was an Olympic record, beating the 23-10 that she jumped in winning the heptathlon gold medal Saturday. The record before that was 23-2, set by the Soviet Union’s Tatiana Kolpakova in 1980.

It was the first time in 64 years that an athlete had won a multi-event competition and an individual event in the same Olympics. The United States’ Harold Osborn won the decathlon and the high jump in 1924.

After the competition, Kersee, who lives with his wife in Long Beach and is the head women’s track and field coach at UCLA, defied security measures and jumped from the stands onto the track, where he handed Joyner-Kersee an American flag.

They held hands and bowed to the crowd.

Then Kersee pushed his wife on her way to a victory lap.

It was quite an improvement over Joyner-Kersee’s Olympic performance in 1984, when she finished second by only 5 points in the heptathlon and fifth in the long jump.

Since then, the UCLA graduate has become the dominant performer in both events.

While no other woman has scored more than 7,000 points in the seven-event heptathlon, Joyner-Kersee, 26, has done it five times, most recently last weekend, when her score of 7,291 gave her a fourth world record.

She also held a share of the world record with Drechsler in the long jump at 24-5 1/2 until earlier this year, when Chistyakova jumped 24-8. But Joyner-Kersee won the event in the World Championships last summer at Rome and outdistanced both of her primary rivals again Thursday.

It was only Joyner-Kersee’s third long jump competition of the year.

“I’ve been concentrating on the heptathlon,” she said.

Chistyakova took the lead on her first attempt, jumping 23-4. But, competing with her left knee wrapped because of a recent injury, she wasn’t able to better that in her next five attempts.

“A week ago, I couldn’t practice at all,” she said later. “I didn’t tell that to the coaches. I was hoping it would pass.”

Drecshler, who may be the world’s best woman athlete after Joyner-Kersee, moved into the lead on her third jump at 23-6 3/4, then extended it by going 23-8 on her next attempt. That was her best effort, although she was the most consistent performer with 5 jumps over 23-2.

Within an hour after finishing the long jump, Drechsler, who finished third in the 100 meters Saturday, competed in the semfinals of the 200. She finished second in her heat and advanced to the final later Thursday.

Joyner-Kersee was in second place through 3 jumps at 23-6, but she also had fouled twice and didn’t appear to be at her best.

Before Joyner-Kersee’s fifth jump, her husband yelled advice to her. He told her to move her starting mark on the runway back by 4 inches to prevent another foul.

“Move back, run down the runway at breakneck speed and get full extension,” he said.

She must have gotten the message because she had the third-best jump of her career.

“I was trying to go faster,” she said. “I was reaching for the board. I was trying to get my rhythm going. All I wanted to do was concentrate on my consistency, getting a good jump.”

With the pressure off, the gold medal all but won, Joyner-Kersee went all out on her sixth jump.

“You have one more jump in your life,” Kersee told her. “Let them know you’re going for it.”

The number he mentioned was 7.57, a world record of 24-10.

Joyner-Kersee fouled.

But she didn’t seem to care.

“Now I can relax,” she said. “I’m just going to relax.”

She was queen of the hop.