MARION JONES made another determined attempt yesterday to convince the world that she is, and always has been, a clean athlete when she called for the next step in the investigation into whether she may have committed a doping offence to be held in public. Jones, who won five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, followed her attack on Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, last week by insisting that she would not be tried by United States Anti-Doping Agency’ s (USADA’s) “secret kangaroo court”.
It is a sign of Jones’s frustration, with the US Olympic trials only three weeks away, that she should call a press conference in San Francisco to mount another offensive. She testified to a federal grand jury last November and was interviewed last month by anti-doping officials over her alleged links with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) in California, the owner of which is accused of supplying steroids to athletes.
“I will answer all the questions USADA is asking of me for the third time. However, this time I will not answer them in secret and behind closed doors,” Jones said. “I want my name cleared and to move on.”
At the beginning of last week, Rogge was reported to have said that Jones had been “stupid” to associate herself with people connected with doping. Jones responded by claiming that Rogge was “ignorant” for making such a comment. The next day it emerged that Tim Montgomery, the father of her child and the 100 metres world record-holder, was one of five US athletes who had been informed that they may have committed a doping offence.