Marion Jones Admits to Steroid Use

[dec]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100401666_pf.html

Track star Marion Jones has acknowledged using steroids as she prepared for the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and plans to plead guilty tomorrow in New York to two counts of lying to federal agents about her drug use and an unrelated financial matter, according to a letter Jones sent to close family and friends.

Jones, who won five medals at the Sydney Olympics, said she took the steroid known as "the clear" for two years beginning in 1999, according to the letter, which was read to The Washington Post by a person who had been given a copy. A person familiar with Jones's legal situation who requested anonymity confirmed the relevant facts that were described in the letter.

Jones said her former coach, Trevor Graham, gave her the substance, telling her it was the nutritional supplement flaxseed oil and saying she should take it by putting two drops under her tongue. Graham, contacted by telephone today, said he had no comment.

Jones's admissions could cost her the three gold and two bronze medals she won in Sydney. In December 2004, the International Olympic Committee opened an investigation into allegations surrounding performance-enhancing drug use by Jones, once considered the greatest female athlete in the world.

In the past, Jones has vehemently denied using steroids or any performance-enhancing drugs.

Jones said she "trusted [Graham] and never thought for one second" she was using a performance-enhancing drug until after she left Graham's Raleigh, N.C.-based training camp at the end of 2002. "Red flags should have been raised when he told me not to tell anyone about" the supplement program, she said in the letter. She also said she noticed changes in how her body felt and how she was able to recover from workouts.

The clear, also known as THG, is a powerful steroid that was found to be at the center of the performance-enhancing drugs scandal known as Balco. More than a dozen track and field athletes have faced punishments for their use of the clear, which drug-testing authorities could not detect until Graham sent a sample of it to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2003.

Baseball players Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi admitted during grand jury testimony to using the clear, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Barry Bonds also admitted using a substance that he had been told by his personal trainer was flaxseed oil, the Chronicle reported.

The federal probe surrounding Balco, a nutritional supplements company based in Burlingame, Calif., has resulted in five criminal convictions. Jones's coach, Graham, was indicted last November on three counts of lying to federal agents connected to the investigation. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for next month.

The head of Balco, Victor Conte, has repeatedly and publicly accused Jones of using drugs.

Jones, who recently married former sprinter Obadele Thompson, said in her letter that she planned to fly from her home in Austin and meet her mother in New York to enter the plea. She said she faced up to six months in jail and would be sentenced in three months. Federal sentencing guidelines call for a maximum of five years in prison for one count of lying to federal agents.

"I want to apologize for all of this," she said, according to the person reading the letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I am sorry for disappointing you all in so many ways."

Reached at their Austin home, Thompson declined to comment on the letter, portions of which were read to him, saying "the process has to go through before you can make any comments. . . . I'm sure at the appropriate time, all necessary comments will be made." He did not dispute the contents of the letter.

The letter says that when Jones was questioned in 2003 by federal agents investigating Balco, she lied about using the clear even though agents presented her with a sample and she immediately recognized it as what she had taken at Graham's behest. The letter says she lied because she panicked and wanted to protect herself and her coach.

Jones also said in the letter that she lied about a $25,000 check given to her by track athlete Tim Montgomery, the father of her young son. Montgomery pleaded guilty in New York this year for his part in a multimillion-dollar bank fraud and money-laundering scheme.

Jones said she told investigators she knew nothing about the deposit, even though Montgomery told her it was from the 2005 sale of a refurbished vehicle and was partial payment for $50,000 she had lent him.

"Once again, I panicked," she wrote. "I did not want my name associated with this mess. I wanted to stay as far away as possible."

[Sky Blue]

Hardly a surprise. Athletics is now a contest between chemists. I've no time for it at all.

[Balboa]

She kept some great company, wasnt she also married to the disgraced shotputter/discus thrower? CJ Hunter. There has always been a cloud over her achievements. Athletics is basically a competition to see who has the best masking drugs.

[Declan]

Surprise surprise. Athletis at the top level is a sham and has been for the last 40 years.

[Star Spangler]

Fair fcuks to her for at least admitting it.  She deserves credit for that.

[Balboa]

Fair fcuks to her for at least admitting it.  She deserves credit for that.

I would imagine she only admitted to it to lessen any sanction/sentence that is coming her way.....

[Gnevin]

Fair fcuks to her for at least admitting it.  She deserves credit for that.

I would imagine she only admitted to it to lessen any sanction/sentence that is coming her way.....

And she's claiming the i didn't know crap, yet she noticed changes etc.

[saffron sam2]

In another shocking, but unrelated story, a one-legged duck has admitted to swimming in circles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100412999_pf.html

[Denn Forever]

Sad really, but why admit it now?  Is she for the high jump (no pun intended).

Roll on Beijing.  Should some one open a book on who will be caught taking drugs?

[nrico2006]

Sure she was with Tim Montgomery too, and he was caught too!

[Declan]

Humphries hits the mark again

Another fast woman leaves me in lurch

Tom Humphries

Locker Room: Me and Ms Jones. The final dagger driven into my splintered old heart hit home on Friday. Marion didn't have the decency to wait for a Saturday night to tell me, and the world, that she'd had a thang going on with the drugs. All the scribes with the swanky Saturday and Sunday columns got to stomp all over her bony ass in a Riverdance of high indignation while I lay down in a dark room.

I suppose all that is left to say is that we won't get fooled again and thanks for wising us all up, Marion. The first Olympics I got sent to armed with my little goose quill and parchment (as we used back then) was the Atlanta Olympics, and on the first night Michelle Smith won a gold medal.

We had been instructed by the veterans of such things to get some quotes off Michelle in the afternoon when she won her heat because the formbook on Irish swimmers was that they had a tendency to drown if they reached finals and were thus difficult to contact for a while. So we stood outside in the afternoon sun as the swimmers trooped out of the arena and our freckled little lady of the chlorine came through and looked like an entirely different species from the rest of the gals. And some of us thought, oh no.

That evening Michelle ploughed through the final like a turbo-charged plough horse (careful when you're mixing those metaphors there, sonny) while all the other dainty little mermaids drank her wash. And later that night we stood outside in this grassy garden and watched herself and her drug-cheat husband, Erik, performing for the media.

Erik threw the head at one stage when asked about drugs and stomped off. Michelle was more polished. When she left we talked in little groups and, like Amy Winehouse with rehab, we said no, no, no.

And some of us wrote no, no, no. More of the gang, members who knew better, rolled with the big show and hung out the bunting.

For a couple of years it was bitter and cold between us all, and even still in Irish sports journalism, though things have been mended, we all recall who wrote what when it came to Michelle and our little civil war.

What I remember of that Saturday night in the balmy little garden though was meeting, for the first time, a hugely impressive American journalist called Gwen Knapp, who worked out of San Francisco and by virtue of covering the circus that is American big-time sport had tons more experience than any of us at the business of shaking her head and saying no, no, no.

Gwen knew swimming and she knew ideals and she shook her head vigorously and said thanks, but no thanks, she wasn't buying anything Michelle and Erik had to sell. And for those of us who wanted to write the same thing in our columns that was helpfully inspirational and sent us off to ask our questions and write our pieces with a bit of steel in our floppy little spines.

Funny thing: when I cranked up the internet (as Homer Simpson says, they have it on computers now, you know) the other day it was Gwen Knapp's syndicated column that came up giving me news of Jones's sudden conversion to truth and justice.

Gwen was her usual crisp, elegant and brilliant self but I wondered reading through her lines how she endures the job she does. Atlanta was 13 years ago and since then Gwen has been working at the coalface of American sport as star after star, icon after icon, saviour after saviour, has been brought down. She works and writes in the very city where Barry Bonds has just concluded the charade that was his drug-fuelled theft of baseball's home-run record.

How would you ever write something positive about professional sport again if you had been up close and personal (workwise) with such a parade of cheats and liars and disappointments? Bonds and Jones in particular are the sort of stories many people passionately wanted to be deluded about. As was Michelle Smith. And the scale of the professional divisions and outright disillusion Michelle left in her wake among journalists is minuscule in comparison to what Bonds and Jones will inflict.

So we all hike off to Beijing next year and journalistically the choices are pretty gloomy. Do you act like a PR flak and report everything face up and ask for them to byline you simply as Pollyanna? Or do you get the scepticism in first?

The story buzzing around the press rooms before the Sydney Games was of a well known and formidable journalist from the New York Times who had asked his editors if they could put an asterisk at the end of each filed report of his and a few words stating he didn't actually believe in anything he had written above. To me it seemed like the ideal solution to the self-respect problem.

No paper will go down the asterisk route though. Television, because it funds sport like a rich sugar daddy, will work up a froth of excitement about anything it buys, and in newspaper offices at editorial meetings smart people will tell each other that what the paper needs in the morning is a big dollop of that there froth from the telly.

So we will plod through another Olympics. We'll wonder if we have the guts to be another Gwen Knapp, the nerve to keep calling it as we really see it even though the whole world wants us to stand on our hind legs and clap along.

On Saturday I watched two underage camogie games. Maybe 50 players in championship action, and it was the most committed, heroic, impassioned, genuine sport I have seen in a long time. It was everything young women in sport could be.

A friend, a good soccer man, texted me afterwards and said he wished some of the 50-grand-a-week merchants who suck on the big fat teat of the Premiership could have been made watch it all.

Dida, that poor, concussed, possibly terminally damaged AC Milan goalkeeper, was on his mind. Poor man got half a smack in the head from some Celtic yobbo last week and to judge by how the power tragically drained out of Dida's body he may never lead a normal life again.

I texted back a few suggestions as to which players could have benefited from seeing the commitment of the girls. And then I thought of Marion. And Michelle. And the Ma Junren girls. Of Birgit Dressel and the whole line of cheats who could have been exactly what you would want your daughters to be but transpired to be the last thing you would want any kid to turn into.

I don't really care how Marion felt writing her angsty little epistles of apology to family and friends; I don't care that I wasted some of my life sitting listening as she doled out her smooth patter in press conferences; I don't care that I bought into her whole schtick for a while. But she sold out the kids in the parks and on the pockmarked running tracks; she screwed over all the girls who bought her Nike trainers and looked at her nice, goofy smile and thought that they'd go and train like Marion so they could be like Marion. That's tough to swallow.

So I think of how quietly inspirational and encouraging it was to meet Gwen Knapp that night in Atlanta and think of all the girls who must have found something even more encouraging and inspirational in Marion Jones and her megawatt smile.

On Saturday in the Phoenix Park and in Marino even that seemed not to matter. There are parts of the sporting universe Marion and Nike and Balco cannot reach and you just have to go out looking for those places if you want to keep on keeping on in the sports biz.

And if I ever see Gwen Knapp again I must ask her what keeps her going because she wasn't in the Phoenix Park on Saturday morning. Now, Gwen, that was sport. You would have loved it.

[mannix]

Now if only lance armstrong would come clean we would have the biggest culprit.Does anyone really believe he went from donkey to racehorse because he had cancer? No way, he was on some kind of drug and knew how to hide it like jones did.

[Balboa]

Now if only lance armstrong would come clean we would have the biggest culprit.Does anyone really believe he went from donkey to racehorse because he had cancer? No way, he was on some kind of drug and knew how to hide it like jones did.

Spot on Mannix, it isnt if he was on drugs. Now it is a case of who has the best masking agent in their steroids........

[heganboy]

Now Lance is a strange case, an arrogant pain in the arse of a world champion who then got cancer beat it and then came back to wipe out the rest of the world in cycling. I must admit that to me he's a bit of a conundrum, and I can't figure out on which side I land, so for the time being I'm adopting a wait and see attitude.
Here's how I see it, in an era when practically all of the world class cyclists are cheating, is it possible that one guy beat them all (soundly and continuously) without cheating? Its possible but very very unlikely. There are a few other things to consider, the treatment armstrong may well have affected his metabolism especially the amount of oxygen his blood could carry. Would a cancer survior willingly put his body back in harms way by taking the steroids EPO and other drugs of choice of the time, or has he got the "I've beat it once I'll beat it again" attitude?
I retain the belief that it is possible that lance may have been clean but remarkably unlikely, there is some reports from his physio of disposing of syringes and a lot of hearsay. In fact like a long time armagh fan I continue to hope, and sure isn't that what we all have in our association with sport, the hope that despite the odds, despite the history and even when you're on the biggest stage and looking to all the world that you're going to fail, that somewhere within you there is enough to beat the odds...

[thebandit]

Its this sort of craic that makes me glad to be a GAA man