Marion Jones let down her fans and her sport

Marion Jones was a brilliant performer on and off the track. Now she has damaged herself beyond repair. Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images

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I just finished another viewing of Marion Jones's post-guilty plea, courthouse steps press conference last Friday in suburban New York. I have to say, it took me back.

Back to the summer of 2004, when dozens of journalists crowded into a tent to listen to the erstwhile Mrs. Jones speak for the first time after pulling out of the Olympic Trials without qualifying in an individual event. It was dusty and stifling and Jones scarcely broke a sweat while promising a return to greatness and assuring the world that the leaks connecting her to the BALCO scandal were untrue.

Back before that, to a San Francisco hotel ballroom earlier in 2004, when she forcefully told her audience that she had never tested positive for any performance-enhancing substance and said, "There exists no one who can testify truthfully that I have ever used performance-enhancing drugs, simply for the reason that I never have.''

Back to the middle of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, when Jones stood next to her then-husband, behemoth shot putter C.J. Hunter, and pledged her support after his positive drug test results were leaked. That was the first moment when every journalist who had covered Jones from the beginning -- and there weren't many of us -- felt the cold chill of scandal and the sense that this was not going to end well.

Back to the pre-Sydney spring of 2000, when Jones was nearly at the peak of her talents (and, it turns, the peak of her chemical enhancement). She anchored a U.S. record-setting 4X200-meter relay and upon sitting down at a table in the belly of Franklin Field, Jones immediately grabbed the microphone and played moderator: "The young ladies to my right are LaTasha Jenkins, LaTasha Colander-Richardson and Nanceen Perry. Now, if you guys have any questions, go ahead.''

Man, was she good.

It's like Jones's college basketball coach, North Carolina's Sylvia Hatchell, told me when I first profiled the rising Jones in the spring of 1998: "She's like a movie star,'' said Hatchell. "Whatever mood she's in, she can turn it on for the cameras. I've seen her do it so many times and I am just amazed.''

Jones turned it on last Friday. It was a brilliant and compelling performance, and that's not to say it wasn't sincere. Jones was strong, yet she wept. She spilled her guts and her tears, yet she kept her dignity. She apologized passionately to every constituency that might have been hurt by her admission that she did, in fact, use performance-enhancing drugs. (Although it's fair to argue that most members of those constituencies had turned the page long before Jones did).

In the big picture, it was the right thing to do. A broad, self-effacing apology that asked nothing in return but forgiveness. There's no way to know how much it was influenced by threat of additional jail time, but in any case, it was as moving and dignified a finish as Jones could hope to pull from this mess.

Yet nothing has ever been simple with Marion Jones. Nothing has ever been clear. Not from the moment she burst back into the track work with a sensational sprint performance at the U.S. national championships in Indianapolis in June 1997 and then let it be known that she was dating a shot putter (red flag) and being coached by an unknown (smaller red flag, but still...).

The winding path that took her from that weekend in Indy to last Friday's courtroom in New York is too lengthy to recite here in its entirety. It was, at all times, an epic journey. Time has allowed a damaged track world to forget just how Marion-centric the sport was from 1998 to 2001. She was the queen, unlike any female track athlete since the late Florence Griffith Joyner. Unlike any track and field athlete at all since Carl Lewis in his prime.

Customarily, when a drugged athlete falls, there is only satisfaction. They get what they deserve. You want to say -- as Victor Conte did -- that everyone is using something? Fine, they should all go down.

But when Jones stood before the microphones on Friday afternoon, I felt an odd sadness. Understand this: Jones and I were not friends. She stopped speaking to me in the summer of 1998 because she didn't like the truths I wrote in a long Sports Illustrated profile. (Actually, she did speak to me once more, in an expletive-laced voicemail after I faxed her in an attempt to mend fences in the spring of '99). We had no relationship, personal or professional.

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