Perec bids goodbye to athleticsMarie-Jose Perec (seen in this August 22, 2003 picture from a press meet) is retiring a ‘contented woman’

Paris: Triple Olympic champion Marie-Jose Perec retired from athletics on Tuesday after four seasons of doubt and hesitation (as reported in Tuesday’s Late City edition).

Perec told the sports daily l’Equipe she had made her decision in September after missing the Paris world championships because of a sciatic nerve injury.

One of the stars of the Barcelona and Atlanta Olympics, the Frenchwoman needed the four years between the Sydney and Athens Games to realise she would never make it back to the top.

“For a few weeks, I tried to run again several times with the Athens Olympics in mind,” Perec said.

“Symbolically, I could see myself finish my career in the Olympics homeland.

“I jogged a little, in Paris and at home in Guadeloupe but I could feel my body tell me to stop it, that it was enough.”

Perec said her ideal farewell would have been to “win a fourth Olympic gold in Sydney and say goodbye”.

The Guadeloupe-born athlete had not competed since she fled the 2000 Sydney Olympics and a showdown with Australian Cathy Freeman, claiming she had received death threats.

Freeman, who won the gold medal on an emotional night for the host nation, retired almost a year ago.

Perec announced her return to training in February last year, hoping to take her revenge on home soil against Freeman at the world championships in Paris.

But the injuries which plagued her career struck again.

Perec became the second woman in history to complete an Olympic 200-400 double at the 1996 Atlanta Games having won the 400 gold four years earlier in Barcelona. She also won world titles over 400 metres in 1991 and 1995.

She did not run for two years after the Atlanta Games citing chronic fatigue syndrome and off the track she was a controversial figure.

“Marie-Jo has a difficult temper. She is egocentric and often behaves as if she were the centre of the universe,” said her former coach Francois Pepin.

After running to her double in Atlanta, she was seen live on television abusing cameramen because their close-ups did not show her personal sponsor’s name printed on a T-shirt she had slipped over her national team’s jersey.

The Sydney Games were her downfall. She disappeared in the middle of the night with her boyfriend, American sprinter Anthuan Maybank, acting as a bodyguard to fend off the television crews.

“I only have one regret — not to have written the last page of this beautiful story in Sydney. But well, it’s an incident that is part of the story,” Perec told l’Equipe.

“The 400 metres in Sydney was not a race against Cathy Freeman, it was a race against an entire nation which had its problems.

“I was only prepared for a 400 metres, for sport,” she said.

Perec, who cited her first Olympic gold in Barcelona as her fondest memory, said she would go to Athens as a consultant, without feeling any frustration.

“I’m retiring a contented woman. I had great emotions and now I want to know what it’s like on the other side,” she said.