How sad is the Jones steroid saga?, By Bernie Lincicome
August 24, 2006
To illustrate what Marion Jones meant, or should have meant, to sports, to track, to field, to fair play, let me recall my first meeting with her, at the U.S. Olympic trials before the Sydney Olympics when she was fresh and barely soiled.
Who was this lovely, athletic whirl vowing to win five gold medals?
"On the subway in Tokyo, young girls started to cry when they realized Marion was among them," a Nike press hack explained to me. "To walk the streets of Paris without security would be extremely difficult for her."
Well, now, I have myself nearly broken into tears on the Tokyo subway, being crammed in like an anchovy, nose against the door and shoulder in the ear of a very large sumo trainee, he complete with the aromatic hair grease that keeps the bun in place.
Plus, Jones would get no sympathy from me on the Paris score. Having twice myself been mugged in Paris, in spite of the advance warning of galloping garlic breath and lack of deodorant, I can say that the cautious American does not venture down the Rue de la Paix without pepper spray and a Rottweiler.
Yet, still, was I impressed, and I knew what Junior Nike meant. Jones was much more popular abroad than at home and that soon we would all realize what a treasure we had in young Marion.
Sydney confirmed it all, and if she did not do exactly what she said she would, three golds and two bronzes were remarkable as well as unprecedented. Only glory awaited.
Her positive test for the synthetic hormone EPO this summer has yet to be confirmed by a second sample, and Jones is shocked by the news of the first one. At age 30, with even Sydney now called into doubt, she is shamed, and tears on Japanese subways must come for other reasons.
In her way, with a cloud over her since before anyone cared, Jones is still the most distressing of the summer's drug cheats, worse than Tour de France disgrace Floyd Landis or sprinter Justin Gatlin, sadder than the abiding suspicion of Barry Bonds.
For those and their games, there will be replacements, new stories eagerly told, but another Jones is not so likely.
For the briefest time, about as long as it took her to sprint from here to there, track and field had fascination and allure and style. Even for a spell, Jones was arm in arm with Tim Montgomery, the two fastest of their gender, coupled and prized, a sort of natural fusing of excellence.
Montgomery was disgraced, caught and suspended, much as was Jones' former husband, the hulking shot-putter C.J. Hunter, who found her as a North Carolina basketball player and later ratted her out.
After assorted connections with BALCO and with shady coaches, after a brief and fairly anonymous failure at the Athens Olympics, and with improved sprint times after years of ordinary results, after she was gone and suddenly she was back, swearing that she has never, ever done any drugs, now her disgrace is even more greatly amplified.
Track may now return to its grim and private world, unable to make the same connection with someone who had just the right combination of talent and looks and raw brilliance.
Jones' natural ease with celebrity was unlike any Olympic figure since, oh, Mary Lou Retton. She had every combination of ingredients the usual jock does not, beauty, warmth, communication, visible teeth. You rooted for her. You had to.
Jones went from champion to defendant, from winner to whiner, from superwoman to suspect. Nike left her to fend for herself.
Had Jones simply stopped after Sydney, had she used her natural ease with stardom to promote her sport, promote herself as more than muscles and charm, had she let those medals stand as her legacy, we would have been none the wiser and certainly less aggrieved.
This is not to condone her getting away with something but to honestly wish we still knew less than what we know now.
There is no way of knowing if Jones would have been as good, or good enough, because this has been following her since she was a teenager, but just as you had to root for her, you have to believe that she would.
Even now you want to believe the suggestion made by her current coach that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is out to get her because, well, they hadn't been able to.
Knowing that, or thinking that, how much more careful would Jones have needed to be?
It did take a Jones to shock us this late on the list of drug frauds. Whoever is next will get a quiet yawn.
As for Jones, she'll always have Paris.
