Within days of the latest Mitchell Report's release, I overheard the news that Marion Jones--the Olympic athlete who took three gold medals at the Sydney games--had been sentenced to six months in prison for lying about something we already knew: she has been taking performance-enhancing drugs.
We knew, in 2004, when she 'protested (just a little) too much,' saying, "I have never, ever used performance-enhancing drugs." Dick Pound (what a whirl!), chairman of the World anti-Doping Agency, admitted as much standing on the courthouse steps. He said, "The fact that she was using performance-enhancing drugs is not a surprise."
In fact, we knew, in 2000, when we watched her perform--her gait, so relaxed and free; her stride, elongated; her muscles ripped. What Dick Pound will only admit "suspect[ing]," that is, we knew; and we watched her performance in rapt exultation. She was 'bringing home the gold;' and she was exuding bi-sex appeal in the process. What more could American audiences want?!?
We loved her (then). As I recall, she was the news--so much so that I actually grew sick of hearing about her towards the Games' end. (My suspicions are always aroused whenever we have that kind of urgency about building somebody up--most especially, a Black somebody. The writing is always, right there--'on the wall.')
Of course we spent the last seven years witnessing her slow, spiraling descent from our (I started to say, her) Olympic glory days--because that's what they were: our--i.e., American--gold medals. Let's face it, Marion Jones (and Barry Bonds) made the BALCO doping scandal--an otherwise dry, overly technical story about corporate crime--'frontpage news.'
The media loved it; because it sold whatever they were selling. And so did we; and for more reasons than can be recounted here. Suffice it to say, our morbid curiousity being what it is--we find solace, at least, in such public morality plays. At its most benign--a kind of 'there but for the grace of G-d go I;" a sense of relief, coupled with a tacit acknowledgement of the sacrifice that's always associated, somehow, with 'lessons learned.'
This was the frame in which Mrs. Jones-Thompson herself cast the sentencing judge's decision: six months in the federal pen. On the courthouse steps, immediately after District Judge Kenneth Karas denied all pleas for leniency, especially those made on behalf of her two young children, Jones-Thompson said, "I promise that these events will be used to make the lives of many people improve; that by making the wrong choices and bad decisions, can be disasterous." This relentless goal-setter has cast her eyes on nothing less than redemption: 'others will learn from my mistakes.'
Curiously, despite Marion's obviously genuine contrition (a truly rare thing, these days), Judge Karas was vexed because he did not have a legal basis for sentencing this particular 'American darling' to even more time in the federal pen. According to one news source, Judge Karas made specific inquiries, looking for some way to "go beyond the six-month maximum sentence suggested in her plea deal;" going so far as to ask whether he could sever the charges in the indictment so he could hand down a sentence on each respectively.
I mean, what is that about? Am I the only one who's wondering how this tale of woe could possibly emerge in tandem with all the other stories of doping in professional and quasi-professional sports? To these, and other questions, I will return.
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