With the US Olympic trials in Sacramento shifting into low gear for a couple of days, the short programme on Monday night was supposed to be light and easily digestible, a moment in the spotlight for those who won't be seeing any spotlights in Sydney. Instead, the organisers got a little controversy and a lot to think about.

The men's long jump has for the last four Olympics just been one of those events that looked after itself for America. Each time they'd send Carl Lewis out, and while he was taking care of other business, he'd wrap up the gold medal for leppin'.

For an American to get into the medals at all this year will require a freakish feat of levitation more commonly associated with magic shows than athletics so perhaps the best drama of the year was the trials. No American has leapt out past the 28-foot plateau since 1996 and as the winner himself said: "We ain't getting no respect anymore."

In the end, Melvin Lister got himself off the ground for 27 ft 3 3/4 ins worth of flight, almost six inches behind Carl Lewis's trials meet record and over two feet behind Mike Powell's world record but enough to get him a ticket to Sydney if not some R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Second and third were Dwight Philips and Walter Davis who submitted more modest jumps. Critically, Lister was the only jumper to get out past 27 feet and his qualifying mark was the lowest since 1980 when Larry Myrick's gravity-laden act so depressed Americans that the opted to use Afghanistan as a pretext for skipping the Olympics altogether.

This year's fun and games came with the fourth-placed Robert Howard whose final leap appeared to have landed him on the plane to Australia, but who was deemed by a judge to have trailed his shorts lightly in the sand thus shortening his mark by several inches. Painful.

Howard, a medical student from Arkansas, was credited with a final jump of 26 ft 3 3/4 ins, but insisted volubly, vehemently and vainly that the real mark was seven inches further advanced. The crowd down the back straight where the long jumpers work agreed with him. For 10 or 15 minutes Howard's histrionics lit up the evening as he moved about in the distance gesticulating like a character in a silent movie. Eventually six officials had to move him away. His outrage hadn't subsided by the time the media reached him.

"Hello? Can you see that?" he said pointing to a replay on the big screen. "I go to damn medical school. I've got 20-20 vision. How in the hell can you tell me that I can't see where I landed. Now they want me to pee in a cup. The whole thing is nonsense. This is wrong. Wrong."

And the feeling in the media tent was that if nobody is going to get near the medals, well, America should be doing the decent thing and sending colourful stories to Sydney.

That's what it has come to in the men's middle to long distance events where Americans have been taking stock recently.

The 1,500 metres at the weekend went to a good old-fashioned flower child from California. Gabe Jennings is a cross between Jerry Garcia and Neil from The Young Ones. "I would not describe myself as a free spirit," he told us, "but you are welcome to."

He spoke of the crowd at Hornet Stadium as being "his brothers and sisters" and was almost right in the literal sense, his parents Jim and Suzie having set up a 40-person percussion section in a corner of the bleachers, just to help out.

"I sang and I danced and I rapped a little today," Jennings told a bemused press tent afterwards. "And now I want to rap a little for you."

Which he did as journalists looked at the floor and struggled to keep a straight face.

"You know," he continued when a little equilibrium was restored, "the moon out there kept getting bigger and the air kept getting fresher. I grew up on the river on the forks of the Salmon. The rhythms were exhuming. When I ran it was like the rhythm of a song I had already heard."

Look out for Gabe, he hasn't a hope in Sydney but in the land of the dreamtime he may be right at home.

The 5,000 metres final doesn't take place till this weekend but again the heats have scarcely had the Americans feeling sanguine about their chances in Australia. Bob Kennedy, the nation's premier performer at the distance, concedes that perhaps two thirds of the African continent is ranked above him. Back problems kept him from training for three key weeks however. Now he is struggling.

He took the 13th of the 16 places for Friday's final but as one of only two whites to go the distance in under 13 minutes his time of 13:46:07 reflected, among other things, a drastic absence of speed in the closing stages.

American steeple-chasing is struggling too. Mark Croghan was among the top qualifiers for next weekend's final with a run of eight minutes 26.75 seconds. Croghan, easily the best US steeplechaser of the past decade, could be forgiven the rust in his stride, his infant son is in intensive care in Cleveland suffering from a congenital heart defect.

Yet with Croghan's focus on more important matters the plight of American steeple-chasing seems all the starker, the world record of 7:55:72 held by (naturally) a Kenyan, Bernard Barnasai is 15 seconds under the 15-year-old US record.

The brightest glimmer of hope from Monday night's programme was the performance of Sandra Glover in the women's 400 metres hurdles final. The two giants of the event, Kim Batten and Tonja Buford-Bailey, have been missing for a while, the former suffering from injury the latter enjoying motherhood but they returned only to be beaten into second and third positions by Glover.

Meanwhile, Sonia O'Sullivan will have watched with interest the heats of the women's 5,000 metres which saw her old sparring partner from Athens, Regina Jacobs, top the qualifying list with a time of 15:36.09, well outside her own US record. The finals take place on Friday night.