Marion on Oprah

Thankfully, I didn't have to watch that train wreck--Epelle did it for me. If you missed it, check out his post on the matter. Oprah's site has video.

Just Kill Me Now

Marion Jones will be on Oprah on Wednesday.

There will be more tears than honesty, that's all I can say.

What Awaits Behind Bars

The Swedish Athletics in the News blog describes the experiences Marion Jones likely will have in the penal system.

The greatest challenge facing Jones will be her attitude - something she will need to have checked at the door. As a (former) celebrity ex-millionaire, Jones will have no superior status in prison; she, the winner of five Olympic medals by method of fraud, will be classified as a white collar thief. She'll have to learn to play by two set of rules: Prison rules and prisoner rules; there won't be an opportunity to lie, cheat and steal her way through the six months governing her next stage in life. Breaking these rules can have consequences leading to banishments of different proportions, including life.

Fascinating stuff about a part of the American experience with which I have absolutely no knowledge.

Anti-Doping News

Marion Jones sentencing:
Six months in a minimum-security prison (which ESPN's legal analyst said was unlikely to be any less than four months of real time), plus two years probation and 800 hours of community service; must report by March 11. ESPN has the video.

The judge did not go easy on her; he was making noise about consecutive sentences for the two charges, but he went with concurrent instead. Still, she got the top end of the recommended sentence. His statements indicated he thought doping was as egregious a violation as the two counts of lying, even though she was not charged for it.

Error: ESPNews reported that she has been "wiped from track's record books". What records did she have? She never held any World, US or collegiate records. She does have some high school records, but I'm not aware that they have been struck.

There are a lot of people who think this kind of thing is bad press for track. Personally, I find it dismaying that ESPNews reneged on their promise to carry the sentencing live, and that O.J. Simpson's latest troubles quickly knocked her off their "Breaking News" graphic. Our scandals can't even compete! I tell ya, track gets no respect, no respect at all...

That gets the headlines, but it's not really that important. The news that is very important is the new Partnership for Clean Competition, a collaborative anti-doping effort between the USADA, USOC, MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL and PGA. Baseball and football will pump $6 million into research (i.e., new doping tests) over the next four years--chump change to them, but huge in the anti-doping world. By comparison, WADA has spent $31 million on research in its entire seven-year existence.

Whether or not the pro sports organizations actually adhere to the USADA/WADA code is of little importance to me. More important is what they can do for track. This partnership exists only to fund drug-test development; first up is an HGH test. We all know just how badly this test is needed, but even my eyes were recently opened as to its ease of availability. When a local Toledo bar was searched for evidence in a relatively routine DUI/homicide case, police stumbled upon HGH, syringes, clenbuterol (the drug for which Katrin Krabbe was busted), and "an unknown clear liquid".

Anti-Doping News

Most every paper in the country ran a short wirestory on Marion Jones today. Most didn't go much beyond saying this:

Marion Jones used several different performance-enhancing drugs over a substantial period of time, according to a detailed doping calendar that was part of several pages of court documents released Friday.

The San Francisco Chronicle tells us a bit more.

To demonstrate the extent of Jones' use of banned drugs, the government filed a set of doping calendars and ledgers that were seized in a raid on the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in Burlingame in 2003.

An accompanying affidavit by IRS criminal investigator Jeff Novitzky said the documents showed Jones regularly used the undetectable BALCO designer steroid known as "the clear," along with human growth hormone, insulin and the blood-doping drug erythropoietin, or EPO. To ensure that she could beat tough Olympic drug tests, Jones had her blood tested for steroids by a private laboratory, the documents showed.

Most sports fans read this as merely info that Jones was doping, which we all knew already. The Chronicle actually does an unusually good job of journalism by carefully explaining why this info has come out: Jones is being sentenced for perjury, and the documents show that she "engaged in a concentrated, organized, long-term effort to use these substances for her personal gain, a scenario wholly inconsistent with anything other than her denials being calculated lies."

So over at the T&FN message board, attack dog Epelle actually posted the documents referred to above. Those calendars are not news; we knew about them some four years ago. But back then Jones' defenders said they could have been created by anyone who had it in for her. To say that now is ludicrous; federal prosecutors don't take risky items to trial as evidence.

But in the bigger picture, it should be noted that the number of times bold accusations of doping are made and do not ultimately turn out to be true are few and far between. Back in the 1986-88 time period, Carl Lewis made statements about steroid use that in retrospect could only have been directed at Ben Johnson. At the time he took a lot of flack for it, but he turned out to be right and I can't recall anyone apologizing to him about the whole thing. And this is only one example.

Tank McNamara takes on Marion Jones

Sorry if they're a bit small to read easily (this is as big as Blogger makes it). Click on the strip for a larger version.

Jones fallout

The chatter on the message boards and in the press is full of shock and disappointment. Come on, folks. This is as surprising as if O.J. came out and admitted he killed his wife.

Or, more accurately, if he admitted that he only killed Ronald Goldman. Jones' admission is strangely narrow, covering just a two-year period. There was no spike in her performance that might indicated heavy PED use just then (although in 2001 she occaissionally was beatable). Most likely, her admission was just enough to cover deal with perjury issues and nothing more. It's entirely possible that her whole career has been boosted; she holds world records for 15- and 16-year olds but went out and hired Johnny Cochran to defend her from a missed-test sanction when she was in high school.

In his post 5 questions about Marion, Clay Parker asks "If Marion (with her talent) was using and "only" running 10.8s in '99 and '00, what does that say for everyone else that has run 10.8s or better. Are there any clean times in the top 20 ?" Leaving aside the issue of whether Clay meant 10.80 or 10.89, let's actually examine this.

Prior to the advent of random out-of-competition testing in 1990 and the '91-'92 fall of the eastern European governments that carried out doping, it's fair to simply say that the rules of competition were different. It was pretty easy to get around doping tests and even the positives were sometimes scrubbed. Tossing them all out removes some who were certainly on something (e.g. Marlies Göhr) along with some who were generally thought not to be (e.g. Evelyn Ashford) but it's like the javelin--new rules, new statistical lists.

Among those remaining, the following athletes have had doping issues, and their marks are removed from the lists:
Marion Jones (admission)
Chioma Ajunwa (lifetime ban)
Zhanna Block (implicated in BALCO but not banned; almost certainly recieved their products)
Torri Edwards (ban reduced; only once under 10.90 and wind-aided at that)
Chryste Gaines (BALCO-related ban)
Ekateríni Thánou (famous "motorcycle accident")
Kelli White (admitted)
Merlene Ottey was banned for a short time but her ban was reversed and her name cleared.

Of the remainder, Ivet Lalova is widely considered to have caught a flyer when she ran 10.77, and Liu Xiaomei and Li Xuemei ran strange times under strange conditions in a strange meet. Since these were one-off performances for each athlete, they get stricken from the record as well.

What remains can be looked at in two different ways. By official time:
10.73 Christine Arron 8/19/1998 Budapest
10.74 Merlene Ottey 9/7/1996 Milano
10.77 Irina Privalova 7/6/1994 Lausanne
10.78 Merlene Ottey 9/3/1994 Paris
10.79 Inger Miller 8/22/1999 Sevilla
10.80 Merlene Ottey 7/13/1992 Salamanca
10.81 Inger Miller 8/22/1999 Sevilla
10.81 Christine Arron 8/19/1998 Budapest
10.82 Gail Devers 8/1/1992 Barcelona
10.82 Sherone Simpson 6/24/2006 Kingston
10.82 Gail Devers 8/16/1993 Stuttgart
10.82 Merlene Ottey 8/16/1993 Stuttgart
10.82 Gwen Torrence 9/3/1994 Paris
10.82 Gwen Torrence 6/15/1996 Atlanta
10.82 Gail Devers 7/7/1993 Lausanne
10.82 Gail Devers 6/17/1993 Eugene
10.82 Irina Privalova 6/22/1992 Moskva

and then by wind/altitude adjusted time:
10.75 Gail Devers 8/1/1992 Barcelona
10.76 Juliet Cuthbert 8/1/1992 Barcelona
10.77 Sherone Simpson 6/24/2006 Kingston
10.77 Irina Privalova 8/1/1992 Barcelona
10.78 Inger Miller 8/22/1999 Sevilla
10.79 Gwen Torrence 8/1/1992 Barcelona
10.80 Merlene Ottey 9/3/1994 Paris
10.80 Gail Devers 8/16/1993 Stuttgart
10.80 Merlene Ottey 8/16/1993 Stuttgart
10.80 Merlene Ottey 9/6/1997 Tokyo
10.80 Gail Devers 8/23/1996 Bruxelles
10.81 Inger Miller 8/22/1999 Sevilla
10.82 Merlene Ottey 8/1/1992 Barcelona

In any case, sub-10.80s are exceedingly rare, and only Sherone Simpson has approached it once the BALCO hit the fan.

Marion Jones, the final chapter?

I heard the news today. Oh, boy.

Marion Jones admitted using steroids before the 2000 Olympics in a recent letter to close family and friends, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Discuss: Old farts / young punks
Craig Masback statement

It's been a busy time lately; I'm coaching, my house is up for sale, and just a few minutes ago I was helping my wife proofread the final draft of her doctoral dissertation. So I only got the story second-hand as my brother called me this afternoon with the basics. She didn't just up and admit this for no reason; Trevor Graham is going on trial and she was going to have to testify. Obviously she could no longer keep the genie in the bottle.

That Jones used performance-enhancing drugs is a shocker on the level of, say, the US Government explicitly allowing torture. Denying either strained credulity long before we had the official information. And in both instances the real question is, "What now?" What official sanctions will be taken in order to punish the offenders?

Will the IOC strip her of her medals at the 2000 Olympics? What about the IAAF and her achievements at World Championships and the like? How will the various and sundry statisticians of the sport amend their lists? Will Track & Field News amend its World Rankings?

A key to answering all these questions is the IAAF's statute of limitations enacted in the wake of the Dubin Inquiry (aka the Ben Johnson affair). At that time it was set at six years; currently it is at eight years (see Rule 44, pp. 65-66). While no specific date was set in Jones' statement, it states her actions began in 1999, probably just outside the eight-year window, but that it definitely continued on through 2000 and therefore within the time frame for official sanctions. Statisticians and T&FN's Rankings committee, however, are free to act as they wish. Not a peep yet from any of them.

Jones Skipping Season

Forgive me if this is old news:

Marion Jones, conspicuously absent from the track scene since her February marriage, apparently will not compete in the 2007 season.

"I'm almost sure she isn't,'' coach Steve Riddick said in a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press on Friday. He said if she was going to run, he would have known by now.

The article needs one clarification:

Her [2007 season] was highlighted by her 100 triumph to a cheering crowd in Indianapolis.

One crowd, less three fans.

BALCO, perjury, and Marion Jones

There's been some recent news in the BALCO trials; Thursday, cyclist Tammy Thomas (right) was indicted on perjury charges. Yep, that's a woman. You think she might have used steroids?

Also, recently Marion Jones said she's undecided about her future (read: she's thinking about retiring). T&FN message board maven EPelle notes the timing, and wonders if anything is going on:

Her [EPO-positive] "A"-sample was released just after Gatlin's camp went public of his testosterone positive. ...The cyclist gets indicted during BALCO/Phase III (it is in this phase according to authorities) for lying to the Grand Jury in BALCO/Phase I in stating she had never used PED's and/or that she did not get illegal drugs from Patrick Arnold. Marion Jones nearly simultanously states she is unsure what direction she will head in 2007.

Another post by EPelle, quoting the San Jose Mercury-News:

Another possible target for perjury is Marion Jones, an Olympic gold-medal sprinter who also testified in 2003. If she denied using performance-enhancing drugs, Jones might have a problem because her ex-husband, C.J. Hunter, said under oath that he gave the sprinter banned drugs and saw Jones inject herself.

At least two other grand jury witnesses who worked with her former coach, Trevor Graham, have testified in the case. Also, Balco mastermind Victor Conte Jr. has said in interviews with the Mercury News and others that he supplied Jones with performance-enhancing drugs. Jones repeatedly has denied all allegations.

Bonds attorney made an interesting comment on Wednesday:
``If this is phase three, why not indict Barry?'' Bonds' attorney Michael Rains said Thursday. ``The simple answer -- they need the testimony of Greg Anderson.''

The same has seemingly applied to Marion Jones: No witness testimony from Victor Conte. His plea bargain allowed for silence on his part when it came to any help he could have provided the authorities in their fact-finding against athletes, distributors, coaches, officials, agents, etc.

Patrick Arnold received the same condition in his plea agreement, which allowed him to not have to name names. However, he had the following to say:
"Track and field, especially the sprinters, they were more sophisticated in whom to seek out," he offers as a hint.

This is nothing but speculation, but quite interesting to be sure. But why on earth were Conte and Arnold, the masterminds behind BALCO, given this kind of free ride? Strange indeed.