Doping & Drugs ·
IOC Disqualified Marion Jones From All Five Sydney Events
The decision stripped her five medals after her October 2007 admission. She later received six months in prison for lying in two federal investigations.
On October 5, 2007, Marion Jones told a federal judge that her denial of performance-enhancing drug use had been a lie. The American sprinter had won three gold medals and two bronzes at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Now, in court in White Plains, New York, she pleaded guilty to making false statements in two federal investigations and announced her retirement from athletics.
One count concerned her answers to investigators examining the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, known as BALCO. Asked in November 2003 whether she had used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones had denied it. At her plea hearing, she addressed that answer directly: “This was a lie, your honor.” Outside the courthouse, she cried and apologized to her family, supporters and country. “It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you I have betrayed your trust,” she said.
Jones’s account distinguished taking the substance from knowing what it was. She told the court that her then-coach, Trevor Graham, had described it as flaxseed oil, when it was actually the performance-enhancing drug called “the clear.” She said she had used it during the period encompassing the Sydney Games but had not understood at the time what she was taking. By her November 2003 interview, she acknowledged, she knew. She also described its effects: She “felt different, trained more intensely” and experienced “faster recovery and better times.”
The sporting consequences reached every event she had contested in Sydney. The International Olympic Committee formally disqualified her from the 100 metres, 200 metres, 4x400-metre relay, long jump and 4x100-metre relay, stripping all five medals. “She is disqualified and scrapped from the results,” IOC President Jacques Rogge told reporters after the executive board’s decision. Jones had already returned the medals to the United States Olympic Committee and accepted a two-year ban from the sport. The IOC also disqualified her fifth-place long-jump result from Athens in 2004 and barred her from the 2008 Beijing Olympics in any capacity.
Her other guilty plea concerned false statements in a separate check-fraud investigation, not drug use. According to federal prosecutors’ account of her admissions, Jones knowingly lied about a $25,000 check she had endorsed, large checks received by Tim Montgomery and her knowledge of his involvement in the scheme. Montgomery, a former Olympic gold medalist with whom she had had a romantic relationship, had separately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and two counts of bank fraud. Jones’s guilty pleas were for making false statements.
On January 11, 2008, Judge Kenneth Karas sentenced Jones to six months in federal prison for her false statements in the two investigations. The prison term was not a punishment for doping itself. He also imposed two years of supervised release and 400 hours of community service in each year.
Before the sentence, Jones asked Karas to spare her prison. “I plead with you to alleviate the situation by not separating me from my boys, even for a short period of time,” she said. Her lawyers argued that the loss of her medals, livelihood and public standing had already delivered a deterrent message. Karas nevertheless imposed the prison term. Jones was ordered to surrender on March 11, 2008.