A big leap is ahead for Jesse Williams

At an age when a future rival was already being selected for a Russian high-jump school, 7-year-old Jesse Williams of Raleigh was playing "jump the creek."

That meant clearing a creek that ran through his family's backyard in the Valley Estates neighborhood or, as a substitute, placing two sticks farther and farther apart, then leaping from one past the other.

From there, Williams gravitated to a game with higher sticks and higher stakes that has taken him all the way to Beijing. On Sunday, Williams, who jumped for the University of Southern California and N.C. State, will become one of the few Olympians who has grown up in Raleigh. At a relatively short 6 feet, Williams must clear a bar more than a foot and a half above him to have a realistic hope of winning a medal.

He'll start by clearing his mind.

"I'm going to shut myself off to everything a week before I compete," Williams, 24, said before leaving last week for China. "That's what I did at the trials. Turn off my cell phone. Not check my e-mail."

He made the U.S. team last month by winning the Olympic Track and Field Trials in his adopted hometown of Eugene, Ore., with a jump of 7 feet, 6 1/2 inches, then barely missed 7-8 3/4 -- 1 1/4 short of the Olympic record.

To further shut out the world before taking it on, he flew to Dalian (pronounced dah-lyen), a seaside city about an hour's flight from Beijing, to train with his personal coach. He also skipped the Opening Ceremonies.

"Everybody at home in Raleigh, everybody where I'm living right now, USC, N.C. State, I know they're all looking at me, and I definitely want to make sure that they're going to see me in my prime form, they're not going to see me choke. I want to make sure I do something."

A natural jumper

Whether by fate or design, from his track-nurturing parents to his elite coach and Nike contract, the circumstances and people ideally suited to feeding his competitiveness have always managed to find Jesse Williams.

Start with genes.

The son of native New Zealanders with track backgrounds, Williams was born with an athletic disposition and, like his siblings, pushed to use it. His older brother, Ben, and older sister, Hannah, were high jumping before he was.

"I kind of dabbled in it a little bit, because I knew I could just naturally jump. I could jump off one foot really well, which is what you need to be able to do," said Williams, who joined the Junior Striders, a Raleigh-based track and field club, as a second-grader and took up the high jump competitively in the fifth grade.

About two years later, he hit it off with Jason Lowry, a former collegiate high jumper studying genetics at N.C. State. The graduate student worked with the Striders on the side. Williams' talent, technique and passion immediately impressed him.

"He was quite young, but he already had a good sense of the event," Lowry, now living in Pennsylvania, said in a phone interview. "He knew all the big jumpers of the time -- he was very familiar with careers of Charles Johnson, Hollis Conway, Dwight Stones even, and I think that was a big advantage for him. He seemed to study the event. He had the athletic ability, but he also had the brains, more than anybody else I coached at that level."

Lowry coached Williams through high school -- they'd meet in Broughton's gym at 6 a.m. to work before school -- but Williams wasn't ready to specialize. He played like a bumblebee moving from flower to flower: wrestling, soccer, even football. Like high jumping, wrestling's one-on-one challenges appealed to him, and he carried that intensity from the mat to the track.