Marion Jones Admits to Steroid Use

[rosnarun]

while I agree with the bandit / I tdont think the gaa can get too smug. I believe that drug taking in sport is a direct result of professionalism and with so many county teams now going down the professional training route and the indivual financial rewards improving all the time temptation to take drug enhancements is going to get bigger and bigger. God help the 1st guy to be caught and identifed.
If you examine the trsaing regimes and diets of the like if professional rugby and hear they have consultants to let them konow what suppliment they can take and stay on the right side of the law . thats completley agains the spirit of the anti drug law and as close to cheating as makes no differnce. and these are the guy the GAA are learning their scientific coaching method from.
my solution
remove all government money from sport, close down  the 'high performance ' centers who care about medal if it going to spoil lives it sport thats important. let the people who love sport for what it is keep it going let the money men go back to business

[thebandit]

What are the thoughts re drugs and the gaa? Does it go on?

[Hurler on the Bitch]

Ever since she wrote 'A night in November' her career was going downhill anyway..

[Declan]

    
Last Updated: Monday, 8 October 2007, 22:38 GMT 23:38 UK

Jones hands back Olympic medals
Marion Jones
Jones also won four World Championship gold medals
Disgraced sprinter Marion Jones has handed over the medals she won at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the US Anti-Doping Agency has announced.
Jones has also accepted a two-year ban, although she announced her retirement last week when she admitted taking steroids to a New York court.
Jones confessed that she had taken tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) from September 2000 through to July 2001.
The 31-year-old won three golds and two bronzes at the Sydney Games.
The golds came in the 100 metres, the 200 metres and the 4x400m relay, with bronzes in the long jump and the 4x100m relay.
Jones has said the THG she took, also known as "the clear" because it did not show up in doping tests, came from the San Francisco Balco laboratory that was at the centre of US sport's biggest doping scandal.

The US Olympic Committe has asked the athletes who competed with Jones in the relays to return their medals because, USOC chief executive Jim Scherr said, they were won unfairly.But he added that only athletics' governing body the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee could order the return of the medals.
"The outcome of this story is a valuable reminder that true athletic accomplishment is not obtained through cheating and any medal acquired through doping is only fool's gold," said USADA chief executive officer Travis T Tygart.The IOC will also have to decide whether the athletes who finished behind Jones should be awarded Jones's medals.Greece's Katerina Thanou, who finished second to Jones in the 100m, later served a two-year doping ban, following a controversy at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Jamaican Tayna Lawrence won bronze.

Jones pleaded guilty to two felonies in the New York court case - lying to federal investigators about her steroid use, and lying about a separate fraud case.
She faces up to six months in jail under a plea bargain and will be sentenced in January.Last week, IAAF president Lamine Diack said Jones will be remembered as "a fraud".
"If she had trusted to her own natural gifts and allied them to self-sacrifice and hard work I sincerely believe that she could have been an honest champion at the Sydney Games," he said."Now, instead, she will be remembered as one of the biggest frauds in sporting history."

The US Olympic Committee said it had written "a letterof sincere and humble apology to the 205 national Olympic committees and in addition, a more extensive letter to the people in Australia, apologising to the organisers, the volunteers and the Australian people".

[Gnevin]

And in other twist the IOC may have to award the 2000's medals to the person who came second in 2000. Yet was banned in 2004 for drugs