Jessica Ennis kicked off the London Olympic athletics meet with the fastest 100-metre hurdles ever run in the heptathlon before Austra Skujyte of Lithuania responded with the biggest shot put in the history of the seven-event discipline.

It left Ennis to come up with a big 200 meters in the last heptathlon event of the opening day yesterday to confirm herself as the gold medal favorite come Saturday.

If there is anything she can count on, it is the overwhelming support of the crowd. The 80,0000-seat stadium was packed for the opening session and again for the night session.

“It was such an amazing feeling. It kind of gives you goosebumps,” Ennis said.

Ennis has been cherished in the host nation for years as perhaps the best chance for gold in athletics at the Olympics, and the crowd let it be know the wait was finally over. She lived up to those expectations immediately as she shot out the blocks of her first event.

Thousands of fans waved the British flag and gave Ennis a huge ovation when she was introduced for the last heat of the hurdles and she responded with a time of 12.54 seconds, beating the previous best in a heptathlon of 12.62 by Eunice Barber of France in 2005.

She held her hands over her face in disbelief as the time showed on the big screen, realizing she had sliced one-quarter of a second off her best time and set a national hurdles record in the process.

“I literally cannot believe that. That’s crazy. So crazy,” Ennis said. “I’m just so glad I did it here and did it in the heptathlon, where I needed it most.”

Her time day equaled the gold-medal performance by Dawn Harper in the 100 hurdles at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“I had to get a bit closer to the screen to doublecheck the time. Those sort of things are amazing for team morale,” Britain team captain Dai Greene said.

Ennis knew she had to perform strongly on the opening day of the heptathlon, considering her worst of the seven events are on Saturday.

Even though she extended her lead over defending champion Natallia Dobrynska and world champion Tatyana Chernova with a successful jump of 1.86 meters, it was far short of her best of 1.95 in that discipline.

“Would have loved to gone higher in the high jump, but not too bad,” Ennis said.

Then Skujyte replied with 17.31 meters in the shot put, 3.03 metres beyond Ennis’s best and suddenly the British hopeful faced a challenge. Skujyte’s mark was 2 centimeters further than the old mark of Dobrynska.

Skujyte led with 3,126 points after three of the seven events, 64 more than second-place Ennis. Dobrynska was already 206 back and Chernova was 290 behind.

If Ennis confirmed the track was fast, so did the women in the 100 heats.

Carmelita Jeter finished her heat in 10.83 seconds and five more women went under the 11-second mark, including double 200 Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown of Jamaica and US runner Tianna Madison.

Noor Hussain Al-Malki, one of the first women ever selected by Qatar for the Olympics, barely got out of the blocks at the London Games in the 100 preliminaries. Wearing a headcovering and full length sleeves, the 17-year-old sank to the ground after some 15 meters and clutched her right hamstring in pain before she was taken away in a wheelchair.

Doping scandals also did not miss their start on the opening day of the athletics programme.

Three-time world champion hammer thrower from Belarus Ivan Tsikhan was kicked out of the London Olympics yesterday because an IOC retest found his doping samples from the 2004 Athens Games to be positive.

And in the 1,500, Morocco’s Amine Laalou was a non-starter in his heat, following media reports he had been involved in a doping case.

IAAF spokesman Nick Davies could not confirm the report and Morocco’s federation secretary general Hammed Rhaziane did not respond to calls to his cell phone.