THE International Olympic Committee formally stripped Marion Jones of her five Olympic medals yesterday, wiping her name from the record books following her admission that she was a drug cheat. As far as the IOC is now concerned, her performance at the Sydney Games of 2000 never happened.
Once the world's biggest track and field star, who peaked with three gold and two bronze medals in Sydney, Jones is now just another disgraced drug cheat.
"She is disqualified and scrapped from the results," IOC president Jacques Rogge said at th
e close of a three-day executive board meeting. The IOC also banned Jones from attending next year's Beijing Olympics in any capacity and said it could bar her from future games.
The IOC postponed a decision on redistributing her medals, including whether to strip her eight American relay team-mates and whether to upgrade doping-tainted Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou to gold in the 100 metres.
Jones won gold medals in the 100m, 200m and 4x400m relay in Sydney, and bronze in the long jump and 4x100m relay. She was the first female track and field athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics. In addition to stripping her Sydney medals, the IOC disqualified Jones from her fifth-place finish in the long jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Jones had already handed back her medals. The IOC said it would now ask the US Olympic Committee to get Jones to return the diplomas she received for competing in Sydney and Athens.
Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) erased all of Jones' results dating to September 2000, but it was up to the IOC to formally disqualify her and revoke her Olympic medals.
"The issue has been damaging for Miss Jones, that goes without saying," Rogge said. "I still think that this is a good thing for the fight against doping. The more athletes we can catch, the more credible we are, the more deterrent effect we will have and the more we are going to protect clean athletes."
After long denying she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted in federal court in October that she started using steroids before the Sydney Games. She said she'd used the designer steroid "the clear" from September 2000 to July 2001.
Rogge said the IOC had initiated the process for removing the American relay teams' medals, but would give the runners a chance to state their case at a hearing. He said the athletes would be represented by the US Olympic Committee (USOC), even though the body has already said the relays were tainted and the medals should be returned.
"We cannot disqualify the two relay teams without offering to the USOC a proper hearing," Rogge said. "It's up to the USOC to decide what to do about that." The issue should be resolved
at the next executive board meeting in Beijing in April.
The US 4x400m team included Jearl-Miles Clark, Monique Hennagan, LaTasha Colander-Richardson and Andrea Anderson. Chryste Gaines, Torri Edwards, Nanceen Perry and Passion Richardson were on the 4x100m relay squad.
IOC vice president Thomas Bach, who heads the three-man disciplinary panel in the Jones case, said he would like her to come forward and provide any information she has on other Olympic athletes or coaches who were involved in BALCO - the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative that is under investigation in the US for providing athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.
Jones' doping admission came as part of her guilty plea to lying to federal investigators in the BALCO case about using steroids. She will be sentenced on 11 January and is expected to face a term of between three and six months. Around three dozen athletes are affected by the reshuffling of Olympic medals due to Jones' exclusion.
The full article contains 647 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
