Tour de France

[goodluck]

Now Marion Jones.


Jones Admits She’s a Tarnished Golden Girl
By HARVEY ARATON

A seven-year race to stay ahead of the performance-enhancement posse that long ago rounded up the flawed, opportunistic men in Marion Jones’s life is over. She was tripped up not by a snitch, not by a drug test, but by the floppy, loose laces of her own face-saving lie.

She did not believe she could come clean when she told federal agents in 2003 that she had not used the designer steroid THG, also known as the clear, in preparation for her five-medal harvest at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She could not plead ignorance by playing the flaxseed oil card she has turned over now, the way her Balco compatriot Barry Bonds did in front of a grand jury investigating the case.

Because unlike baseball, which played deaf, dumb and blind to the culture of sports pharmacology until 2002, the Olympics was long into chasing down cheaters. Jones, in a desperate coverup to protect her legacy, has finally been confirmed as one of them.

She will plead guilty in federal court in New York today to lying to federal agents about her drug use and to an unrelated financial matter. Given the international suspicion that has attached itself to Jones in recent years, her three gold and two bronze medals will no doubt be stripped by the International Olympic Committee, as well they should be.

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“Is Marion Jones a bad person?” Victor Conte, the brains behind Balco, said last night in a telephone interview. “No. Marion made mistakes. The pain and suffering she is about to endure in public is going to be devastating to her.”

In the summer of 2006, when Jones was dealing with a questionable drug test that turned out to be a false alarm, I still found myself wishing for her to be remembered as the beautiful blur in silver shoes she was in Sydney, guilty of questionable associations. Admittedly, that sentiment reflected a double standard, an indication that keeping tabs on elite athletes peeing into cups was in itself something of a spectator sport.

Root for some while demonstrating indifference if not downright intolerance for others. We are all human, captivated by some storybooks more so than others.

But an admission makes it virtually impossible to cast Jones anymore as Conte would, as a sympathetic victim. No man in her life — not Conte or her one-time coach Trevor Graham, who allegedly supplied Jones the clear, or her former husband C. J. Hunter — made her do it.

Just like Bonds, she is claiming to have been unwittingly enhanced, but why would anyone give Jones, a college educated woman, the benefit of the doubt on that when her legacy has been built on lies? At the end of the day, she didn’t train or run by the rules in the summer of 2000. Her medals should be meaningless to all but her enablers.

“Marion wasn’t doing anything the others weren’t doing,” Conte said. “Was she on performance enhancers? Yes, but she was the superior athlete. You don’t just take performance enhancers and win gold medals.”

The problem with this rationale is that not everyone has been caught or even implicated. In a sport that bestows glory and wealth by virtue of eye blinks, would Jones have been America’s golden girl on the strength of her own natural gifts? Ben Johnson couldn’t prove he was the real deal after Seoul. Neither can Jones — too late and too bad.

For sprinters, the chance for Olympic greatness may come along once in a lifetime. Jones was 24 in Sydney, in the prime of her sprinting life. More than anyone, she cheated herself. She is reported to have said in her letter that she lied to the agents because she panicked, but it sounds like that was the case when she started using the clear in 1999.

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In Sydney, she became the subject of suspicion when Hunter, her husband at the time and world champion shot putter in 1999, was revealed to have failed a drug test. At a news conference now immortalized by time and place and those in attendance (Conte and the renowned late attorney Johnnie Cochran, among them), Jones stood by Hunter, the way she would later stand by a boyfriend, Tim Montgomery, another of the track tainted who bore witness to Jones’s ability to choose well.

For all of his sympathy last night, Conte dogged her by volunteering revelatory information whenever he could. He happened to be right, which makes him no more a hero in any of this than the baseball snitch Jose Canseco, just more evidence of what happens when an infestation is under attack.

“I think at some point, someone, some athlete, has to step up and ask for forgiveness for all that has happened with Balco,” Conte said.

The way it looks, at least right now, it won’t have to be Bonds, unless his Balco middle man, the trainer Greg Anderson, decides to talk. As for Jones, forgiveness should not be out of the question, only retention of her medals.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/sports/othersports/05araton.html?_r=1&oref=slogin