sport cheaters

The dye has been cast. Yet another sporting personality has been floored - more through her own undoing – Sprint queen Marian Jones joins a list of celebrity sportspersons who have fallen from grace - taking the banned steroid Tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) to upshot her performances on the track.

On her day the ‘Fastest woman on Earth’, and arguably the best female athlete in the world, Marion Jones could outrun just about anyone on the track.

After evading the dogged issue of performance enchasing drugs for years, the athlete has finally spilled the beans- that she took banned steroids during the 2000 Olympics.

At the peak of her career, the US athlete outshone and powered over other athletes. She became the first woman to win five medals at one Olympics. Jones made history at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. She landed three gold medals, winning the 100-metres, the 200-metres, and the 1600-metres relay. And she added two bronze medals to her tally in the long jump and the 400-metre relay events.

Marian Jones joins a long list of sporting figures who preferred the shorter route to stardom – stardom through illegal means. Canadian 100-metre champions’ fall from grace in well documented and so has Olympic gold medalist Justin Gatlin failed a drug trust.

Jones who had a troubled childhood turned to success in sports to vent her grief and anger in her personal life.

Jones showed her potential at a young age and at fifteen years of age in 1991 she ran the 200 metres in 22.87 seconds, breaking the national high school record. That was the time her mother hired Elliott Mason as a private coach to explore the full potential in her.

In between she shifted her attention to basketball and earned a scholarship to the University of North Carolina, it was while at the university she met her now former husband C J Hunter, a world-champ shot putter who was working as a coach on the track team, whom she married in 1998 and later divorced.

Convinced by Hunter Jones returned to the track in 1997 after giving basketball a skip and the rest is history.

Hunter connection with the world of anabolic steroids was through Victor Conte who was his nutritionist. Conte who was the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), which became the subject of a federal investigation for allegedly providing steroids to dozens of athletes and ended in his conviction in 2005.

Jones ex-husband Hunter and ex-boyfriend Tim Montgomery were both banned from track and field for using illegal performance-enhancing drugs, but she never failed a drug test.

The drug, like most steroids, has side effects which include Jaundice and liver damage, acne, heart problems and euphoria

Whatever it was, whatever she did, one thing was crystal clear that Marion Jones has faulted and she has to pay the price for dabbling in illegal ways to get to her goals.

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