Fall of the queen

IAAF hands the multiple Olympic champion a two-year ban and recommends that the International Olympic Committee take back her Sydney Games’ medals

PARIS: Once ranked among the greatest athletes of all time, Marion Jones has seen the clouds of doping gather until they have irrevocably tainted what should have been a glorious career.

Jones, 31, was on Friday handed a two-year ban by athletics’ world governing body, the IAAF, which also recommended that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) withdraw her five Olympic medals after she admitted doping last month.

Jones, who is now retired, admitted in a US federal court last month that she had used the designer steroid THG, or “the clear”, from September 2000 to July 2001, ending years of angry denials of doping allegations. Jones’ confession came as she pleaded guilty to lying to a federal agent about her drug use, a charge that could see her jailed.

The International Association of Athletics Federations said on Friday that Jones was now considered disqualified from all competitions on or subsequent to September 1, 2000, a ruling that means that all her individual and team competitive results from that date are annulled.

The doping admission tarnished Jones’ greatest triumph — a five-medal performance at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which ran from September 13-October 1 of that year.

It also made a mockery of Jones’ vehement denials of doping over the past four years, as a woman once held up as the epitome of strength and grace tried to distance herself from disgraced associates and from evidence collected in the BALCO steroid distribution scandal that linked her to doping.

Long before she became the most successful female athlete at a single Games by winning three gold medals and two bronze at Sydney, Jones was recognised as an extraordinary sports talent. At nine years old, she was a national sprint champion and at 16 her results earned her a spot as an alternate on the US 4x100m relay squad for the Barcelona Olympics.

She declined that berth, saying she preferred her first Olympic gold to come not as a mere extra in the heats but in a true finals victory. Multi-talented, she was a standout basketball player at the University of North Carolina, where she studied communications and journalism, disciplines that helped provide the basis of her facility in dealing with the press.

A broken foot in 1995 prevented her from competing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and in the wake of that setback she decided to focus on athletics and forego a possible basketball career. Guided by CJ Hunter, the shot putter she married in 1998, and Trevor Graham, the coach she began working with in April 1997, Jones reigned on the sprint track and in the long jump, posting 41 straight victories from 1997-98 in the combined disciplines.

US broadcaster NBC vowed to follow her bid for an unprecedented five gold medals at Sydney “like a mini-series”, but even as she triumphed the first clouds appeared on the horizon when Olympic officials announced that Hunter had tested positive for the steroid nandrolone earlier in the year. Jones said she supported her husband, who never competed in Sydney and was later banned, and went on to complete her own historic Olympic campaign.

In 2003, Jones and the new man in her life, 100m World record holder Tim Montgomery, became the “fastest couple on the planet”. The pair had a son in 2003, Tim jnr, Jones absenting herself from the track that season. By the time she returned in 2004, the BALCO investigation had led to the discovery of the so-called designer steroid THG, and linked the names of many prominent athletes, including Jones and Montgomery, to the lab’s founder Victor Conte. Montgomery was eventually stripped of his world record.