COMMENTARY: Jones' manner masked dishonest intentions

FORT WORTH - Call me stupid. I fell for the smile.

Marion Jones' smile. The smile that I thought and wrote, back in 2000, wasthe face of the "new, modern female athlete."

Radiant and confident.

By the night she won her fifth Olympic medal, Jones had already been unofficially crowned as the queen of the 2000 Sydney Games. As she satdown in the interview room, Queen Marion began her remarks by saying, "Hi, I'm Marion Jones."

She blushed. Her innocence disarmed us.

We lobbed her softball questions. She gave us the smile.

Nobody nagged her about her thenhusband, shot putter C.J. Hunter, who was revealed during the Games as a steroids cheat.

It didn't matter. Bad husbands, we figured, happen to good people.

I wanted to believe in the fairy tale, that the new, fresh princess of track andfield was a young American woman. I trusted the smile.

Call me stupid. Marion Jones is a fraud.

Her habit of surrounding herself with the wrong men continued through and after the Sydney Olympics. Hunter's "nutritionist" in Sydney was Victor Conte, later to become the infamous head of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO).

Boyfriend Tim Montgomery eventually was stripped of his world 100-meters record and suspended for two years for using performance-enhancing substances. Jones' coach was Trevor Graham, who later ignited the BALCO controversy by mailing the designer steroid THG to a media member who turned it over to U.S. anti-doping authorities.

Through it all, Jones was defiant in proclaiming her innocence, never more so than at the 2004 Athens Olympics, where she failed to win a medal.

When ex-husband Hunter claimed that Marion had not only used performance-enhancing substances, but also that he had helped her to inject them, Jones angrily dismissed it as the unfounded accusations of a vindictive former spouse.

When Conte spilled the goods on her following a December 2004 interviewwith ABC, Jones filed a $25 million lawsuit against him. Her defense, until her courtroom guilty plea Friday, was that she had never failed a drug test.

But that's the funny thing about undetectable designer steroids: They're undetectable.

If Graham, for whatever reason, hadn't voluntarily turned over the THG, we might never have heard about BALCO, about Conte, and Barry Bonds would just be another jerk with big muscles and bigger question marks.

I don't mean to suggest that Jones was the naive victim of the steroids men that she surrounded herself with. How do we know that she wasn't the brains behind it all?

What's unnerving is that she lied. She lied and, for a long time, we fell for it. They gave her medals and millions and mansions, and she was cheating and lying the whole time.

She isn't the first gold medalist to lie at the Olympic podium. But she gets my vote as the most deceitful.

I feel for my friends who are involved in American track and field. Jones has dealt their sport a wickedly damaging blow. Ironically, no sport likely has been more upfront about cleansing itself of drug cheats.

But if Marion Jones can scam herway to five Olympic medals, how can track fans truly trust another starting line?

In the buildup to the 2004 Athens Games, for example, officials with USA Track and Field were quick to steer our repeated attention to a young sprinter from the University of Tennessee. Justin Gatlin, they said, was going to be a star in Athens and become the sport's next big thing. And he did, winning the Olympic 100 meters.`

But in the summer of 2006, Gatlin - who had become the USATF's poster boy, its new "drug-free athlete" - was informed that he had tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance. He was given an eight-year suspension from track and field.

Gatlin's coach is Trevor Graham.

It grows increasingly ironic that as the Gatlins, the Bondses and the Marion Joneses are unveiled as deceptive, the ones speaking the truth are turning out to be Conte and Jose Canseco, who've named names.

I think I'll go now, thank you.

Stupid me. For a long time, I trusted Marion Jones' smile.

Next time we won't be so trusting of a confident, championship athlete. And for that, they can all thank Marion Jones.

Sports, Pages 28 on 10/07/2007

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