Keep Marion Jones in Prison

In August of 1999, I was at the world track and field championships in Seville, Spain to begin my coverage—"gathering string" is what we call it in the business—of Marion Jones, who would be NEWSWEEK's cover gal for the Sydney Olympics a year later.

But in a 200 meters semifinal—she had already won gold in the 100 and a bronze in the long jump—Jones pulled up in the stretch and, in visible pain, grabbed her back before sinking to the track. She would be wheeled off on a stretcher and, though the injury was later deemed minor, her championship meet was over.

I stayed in Seville another day, waiting to see if Jones would recover to run on the U.S. relay team. Once she was ruled out, I scrambled my travel plans and got out of town a day early, planning to surprise my wife by arriving home on our anniversary. When I boarded the plane for the flight to Madrid, I was surprised to find myself sitting opposite Jones on the aisle. I leaned over and told her that I was sorry about her injury and wished her a speedy recovery.

In my many years of covering athletes, Jones was one of the rare ones who evinced some interest in other people, even the reporter sitting across from her. Instead of a perfunctory "thank you," she asked my impressions of the championship and then why I wasn't staying for the final weekend. When I explained about my anniversary, she flashed her winning smile and said, "I'm glad something good could come out of all this."

I genuinely liked this lady, and a year later I would write a glowing story—she showed that now-familiar smile on the NEWSWEEK cover—with the headline: MARION JONES: SUPERWOMAN. Other Olympic stories were listed on that cover, including THE DRUG GAME. But neither my piece—"the total package" was one of my descriptives—nor the drug story contained any suggestion that Jones and drugs belonged in the same sentence. And I never could have imagined any other kind of "sentence" in conjunction with Queen Marion.

The fall from grace of Marion Jones is one of the saddest and most stunning in sports history. Last fall, she admitted to an extensive use of performance-enhancing drugs; in federal court she confessed to lying to investigators in both the BALCO drug-scandal case and a check-fraud case involving her former boyfriend, another defrocked sprinter, Tim Montgomery. Outside the courthouse, she said, "It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you that I have betrayed your trust … I have let my country down and I have let myself down.