Athletics: Only Surprise About Jones Drugs Bust Was That Was She Got Caught

When it emerged late on Friday evening that Marion Jones had tested positive for banned performance enhancing drugs, the shock was laced with disbelief that athletics' biggest female star had joined her male counterpart, Justin Gatlin, in bringing shame on the sport. The shock was not so much that Jones had been taking drugs - despite never failing a drugs test there had been enough circumstantial evidence over the years to believe that she was not clean - but that she had been caught.

Until then she had been the Teflon sprint queen. She had been connected with more people associated with doping than almost any other athlete in history, including two partners banned for drugs. And several people had claimed to have been complicit in either helping her to obtain or administer banned performance-enhancing substances, claims she had always denied.

Jones, 30, had survived an investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency during the buildup to the 2004 Olympics, a sustained attack on her character by World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Dick Pound and this summer had even begun to recapture her best form. Then she suddenly goes down for erythropoietin, a blood-boosting drug more commonly associated with endurance athletes but which has been a staple diet of American sprinters' drug regimes for many years and which she had been linked to in the past.

A cheer probably went up in the drug-testing laboratory when they analysed Jones's positive sample taken at United States championships in Indianapolis in June. Jones's positive test appears to indicate that the problem of doping is more endemic and embedded in the culture than even the most cynical of observers believed. As with cycling, it appears no one believes they can compete at the highest level without getting a boost from a chemical jar.

But athletics has only itself to blame for this latest problem involving Jones. Having ostracised her for most of 2004 and 2005 after she was initially linked to the scandal involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, it had been lulled back into a false sense of security and began to welcome her back, a decision I criticised in these pages in May and that I said was indicative of the sport's relaxed attitude towards the problem. It was unbelievable when Fast Track, the promoters of Britain's televised meetings, invited Jones to compete in their flagship event, the London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace last month, paying her $20,000.

Even more staggering , the crowd gave her a warm reception. Jones's reputation was tarnished as long ago as when she was 16. Then, two months before the 1992 US Olympic trials, she was suspended and threatened with a four-year ban for failing to show up for an out-ofcompetition drug test. She avoided being banned then only after hiring the late Johnnie Cochran, the celebrity lawyer most famous for getting OJ Simpson off with murder.

Since then she has featured in one controversy after another as she developed the habit of getting herself involved with men linked to doping. CJ Hunter, the 1999 world shotput champion and her husband at the time, did not compete at the 2000 Sydney Olympics where she won a record five medals, including three gold, after he tested positive for the steroid nandrolone, recording record figures.

She then divorced him and set up home with Tim Montgomery, having a child with him in 2003. When he set a world 100m record in 2002 they were hailed as the Posh and Becks of athletics, but she left him after he told the grand jury investigating the Balco case he had used undetectable steroids.

The men Jones has chosen to coach her have been just as tainted. She originally worked with Trevor Graham, the Jamaican linked to 11 athletes involved in dope cases. When she left him she joined Charlie Francis, the Canadian who encouraged and devised the drugs programme that propelled Ben Johnson to sporting infamy. There was a worldwide outrage over Jones's decision, but only when her shoe sponsors protested did she end the partnership. Jones has recently been working with Steve Riddick, a member of the US team that won the 4x100m gold medal at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, who has admitted that he used anabolic steroids.

Another indicator that Jones was less than pure was that she was all too ready and eager to declare she was against drugs. Marion Jones: Life in the Fast Lane, her 2004 autobiography, addressed the doping allegations with a full-page denial set in oversized, red capital letters. 'I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN UNEQUIVOCAL IN MY OPINION: I AM AGAINST PERFORMANCEENHANCING DRUGS, ' she wrote. 'I HAVE NEVER TAKEN THEM AND I NEVER WILL TAKE THEM. '