Marion Jones
June 15th, 2008
In October 2007, Jones admitted to having taken steroids before the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics and acknowledged that she had, in fact, lied when she previously denied steroid use in statements to the press, to various sports agencies, and--most significantly--to two grand juries, one impaneled to investigate the BALCO "designer steroid" ring, and the other impaneled to investigate a check fraud ring involving many of the same parties from the BALCO case. As a result of these admissions, Jones accepted a two-year suspension from track and field competition, and announced her retirement from track and field on October 5, 2007. . The United States Anti-Doping Agency stated that the sanction “also requires disqualification of all her competitive results obtained after September 1, 2000, and forfeiture of all medals, results, points and prizes”. On October 5, 2007, Jones formally pled guilty to lying to federal agents in the BALCO steroid investigation in the U.S. District Court. On January 11, 2008, Jones was sentenced to 6 months in jail. She began her sentence on March 7, 2008.
At the time of her admission and subsequent guilty plea, Marion Jones was one of the most famous people to be linked to the BALCO investigation. Just 41 days later, Major League Baseball player Barry Bonds was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice and four counts of perjury linked to his own testimony before the BALCO Grand Jury in December of 2003.
Jones, who holds dual citizenship with the United States and Belize (her mother's home country), was born to Marion and George Jones in Los Angeles, California. Jones' father deserted his family two years later, and his daughter has never been able to re-establish any kind of relationship with him. Jones' mother remarried a retired postal worker, Ira Toler, three years later; Toler became a stay-at-home dad to Jones and her older half-brother, Albert Kelly, until his sudden death in 1987. Jones turned to sports--running, pickup basketball games, and anything else her brother Albert was doing athletically--as an outlet for her grief, and by the age of 15 she was routinely dominating California high school athletics both on the track and the basketball courts.
Jones is a 1997 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While there, she met and began dating one of the track coaches, shot putter C. J. Hunter. Hunter was forced to resign his position at UNC due to university rules prohibiting coach/athlete dating. Jones and Hunter were married October 3, 1998, and trained for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics with their new athletic coach Trevor Graham. Graham would later gain notoriety for his role in providing both athletes with Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) designer steroids ("The Cream", "The Clear"), undetectable at the time, as well as providing a sample of BALCO's most successful product ("The Clear") to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), where it was identified as tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) and a detection method was developed.
In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, all eyes were on Marion Jones, who had announced at a press conference during her pre-Olympic book-signing tour that she intended to win gold medals in all five of her competition events at Sydney. Lost in the hoopla and the publicity was a low-key announcement that Jones' husband C. J. Hunter had quietly withdrawn from the Shot Put competition due to a knee injury, though he was allowed to keep his coaching credentials and attend the games to support his wife. However, just hours after Marion Jones won her first of the planned five golds, the IOC announced that Hunter had failed no fewer than four pre-Olympic drug tests, testing positive each time for the banned anabolic steroid nandrolone. Hunter was immediately suspended from taking any role at the Sydney games, and he was ordered to surrender his on-field coaching credentials. At a press conference where Hunter broke down in tears as a subdued Marion Jones sat by his side, Hunter denied taking any performance enhancing drugs at all, much less the easily-detected nandrolone (which showed up in all four tests in amounts over 1000 times normal levels); Victor Conte of BALCO, who was regularly supplying "nutritional supplements" to Graham's athletes, blamed the test results on "an iron supplement" that contained nandrolone precursors and tied previous positive nandrolone tests from Jamaican sprinter Merlene Ottey and British sprinter Linford Christie to the same supplement. As late as 2004, Hunter was still denying the charges and was attempting to gain access to the results to see if they could be analyzed further. Jones would later write in her autobiography, Marion Jones: Life in the Fast Lane, that Hunter's positive drug tests hurt their marriage and her image as a drug-free athlete. The couple divorced in 2002.
On June 28, 2003, Marion Jones gave birth to a son, Tim Montgomery Jr., with then-boyfriend Tim Montgomery, a world class sprinter himself. Because of her pregnancy, Jones missed the 2003 World Championships, but spent a year preparing for the 2004 Olympics. Montgomery, who did not qualify for the 2004 Olympic Track and Field team due to poor performance, was charged by USADA, as part of the investigation into the BALCO doping scandal, with receiving and using banned performance enhancing drugs and sought a four-year suspension for Montgomery. Montgomery fought the ban but lost the appeal on December 13, 2005, receiving a two-year ban from track and field competition; the Court for Arbitration of Sport (CAS) also stripped Montgomery of all race results, records, medals, etc., from March 31, 2001 onward. Montgomery later announced his retirement. The investigation into Montgomery's illegal substance use once more called into question Marion Jones' own protests about not using steroids and never having been tested positive for steroids, especially in light of former trainer Trevor Graham's increasingly visible role in the BALCO case.
On February 24, 2007, Marion Jones married Barbadian sprinter and fellow 2000 Olympic medalist (bronze, 100 m sprint) Obadele Thompson. Their first child together was born in July 2007.
In high school, Jones won the California state championship in the 100 m sprint four years in a row, representing Rio Mesa and Thousand Oaks high schools. She was successfully defended by attorney Johnnie Cochran on charges of doping during her high school track career.
She was invited to participate in the 1992 Olympic trials, and, after her showing in the 200 m finals, would have made the team as an alternate in the 4x100 m Relay, but she refused the invitation. After winning further statewide sprint titles, she accepted a full scholarship to the University of North Carolina in basketball, where she helped the team win the NCAA championship in her freshman year. Jones "red shirted" her 1996 basketball season to concentrate on track. After Jones lost her spot on the 1996 Olympic team because of an injury, she decided to concentrate on track and field.
She excelled at her first major international competition, winning the 100 m sprint at the 1997 World Championships in Athens, while finishing 10th in the long jump. At the 1999 World Championships, Jones attempted to win four titles, but injured herself in the 200 m after a gold in the 100 m and a long jump bronze.
Then in Sydney, Jones told the press that she was aiming for five gold medals. As it was considered a possibility by fans and pundits alike, she was a media darling during the Olympics. However, she finished with three golds and two bronzes, still an astonishing feat which had never been achieved by a female athlete before. She was later stripped of these medals after admitting that she used performance-enhancing drugs at the time. Her ex-husband Hunter, an Olympic shot-putter and confessed steroid user, testified under oath that he had seen her inject drugs into her stomach in the Olympic Village in Sydney, and her coach Trevor Graham was involved in a major drug scandal that broke in 2005, which implicated baseball player Barry Bonds, sprinters Tim Montgomery, Chryste Gaines, Kelli White, and others, many of whom admitted to using illegal drugs while competing. Jones vehemently denied using performance-enhancing drugs until her confession in 2007.
A dominant force in women's sprinting, Jones was upset in the 100 m sprint at the 2001 World Championships, as Ukrainian Zhanna Pintusevich-Block beat her for her first loss in the event in six years; Pintusevich-Block was one of the names revealed by Victor Conte during the BALCO scandals. Jones, however, did claim the gold in both the 200 m and 4x100 m Relay.
On her 2004 Olympics experience, Jones said "It's extremely disappointing, words can't put it into perspective." She came in fifth in the Long Jump and competed in the women's 4x100 m Relay where they swept past the competition in the preliminaries only to miss a baton pass in the final race. Jones promised that her latest defeat would not be the end of her Olympic efforts, and reasserted in May 2005 that winning a gold medal at the 2008 Olympics remained her "ultimate goal."
May 2006 saw Jones run 11.06 at altitude but into a headwind in her season debut and beat Veronica Campbell and Lauryn Williams in subsequent 100m events. By July 8 2006, Jones appeared to be in top form; she won the 100m sprint at Gaz de France with a a time of 10.93 seconds. It was her fastest time in almost four years. Three days later, Jones once more improved on her seasonal best time at the Rome IIAF Golden League (10.91 seconds), but lost to Jamaica's Sherone Simpson, who clocked 10.87.
On January 11, 2008, Marion Jones was sentenced to 6 months in prison for perjury concerning her involvement in the check fraud case and her use of performance enhancing drugs. She was ordered to surrender on 11 March to begin her jail term.
In legal filings prior to sentencing, lawyers for the defense requested US District Judge Kenneth Karas limit her penalty to probation and community service. Part of their argument was that Ms. Jones had been punished enough by apologizing publicly, retiring from track & field, and relinquishing her five Olympic medals. Lawyers for the prosecution had suggested any sentence between probation and six months would be fair (with the maximum penalty being five years in prison). Judge Karas sought advice as to whether he could go beyond the six-month sentence suggested by the prosecution.
During the sentencing hearing, Judge Karas admonished Ms. Jones in the courtroom, stating that she knew what she was doing and would be punished accordingly. "The offences here are serious. They each involve lies made three years apart," said Judge Karas, also adding that Jones' actions were "not a one-off mistake... but a repetition in an attempt to break the law."
On March 7, 2008 Jones surrendered to authorities at Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas to begin her sentence.
