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Marion Jones will enter the great brick stage of Franklin Field today and step onto a track while wearing a USA uniform for the first time in nearly two years.
She comes back to the Penn Relays, and to the sport in which she has won three
Olympic gold medals, as a changed person - and finds the landscape of track
and field has been altered in her absence as well.
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Jones is returning after giving birth to a son, and understands there is some doubt that she can pull off a comeback in this Olympic year. But she also returns under a cloud of suspicion relating to an ongoing federal investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs. That part she doesn't particularly understand, but she isn't shocked, either.
"I'm not surprised at anything I read. I'm not surprised at anything I
hear, and you can imagine some of the things I've heard," Jones said yesterday.
"It hasn't really been a distraction. It's just something I've had to deal
with."
Jones says she has always been a clean athlete, and says she is confident the
federal investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in San Francisco
will eventually prove her right. It is unclear at the moment why her name came
up then, or why Jones had to testify before the grand jury last year, but she
remains innocent until proven otherwise - even if innocence doesn't stop the
talk.
So far, most of the publicity relating to the BALCO case has centered on Barry
Bonds and a handful of baseball players. As the Olympics approach, however,
and as the Justice Department nears the indictment stage of the case, the attention
will turn to track and field. It could become a summer of vindication for a
handful of top athletes, including Jones, or something else entirely.
"It's important for us as an organization that cheaters are caught,"
said Jill Geer, the director of communications for USA Track & Field, "but
it's just as important for completely innocent athletes that are clean to have
whatever process done now because they don't deserve to be held in any sort
of suspicion."
There is too much smoke, however, to believe there is no fire in all this somewhere.
Some athletes have been dirty and some of them have been track athletes. In
fact, Jones' former husband, shot putter C.J. Hunter, who won the Olympic trials
in 2000 but did not compete in Sydney, was one of the athletes who have been
rumored to be involved.
Track coach Remi Korchemny is one of the defendants in the BALCO case, which
is not just a coincidence. Two athletes who testified before the grand jury
last year were among a handful that tested positive recently for the "designer
steroid" THG, the drug at the center of the federal probe.
Believe what you will, and hope for the best, but there is something there,
and a bunch of it will be coming out shortly. At USA Track & Field, which
has been stung over the years by allegations that it is lenient toward cheaters,
this is a going to be a long summer of waiting. What happens if the federal
indictments are handed down between the Olympic trials and the Games themselves,
naming athletes who made the U.S. team? That could happen, and wouldn't that
be a flag-waving bit of publicity?
Until the case is resolved, everyone runs with a shadow in his or her lane.
"We're all looking forward to the judicial process being served correctly,
and we're quite confident that it will be," Jones said. "But all we
can do as athletes is continue to run fast."
Even that isn't as easy for Jones as it was before her layoff. She placed fourth
in the 200-meter run at the Mount San Antonio College Relays last weekend, breaking
a streak in which she won every event at that distance she had entered since
1997.
"I realize when I step on the track, people expect great things. They don't
expect fourth-place finishes, and I don't, either," Jones said. "But
considering everything I've been through, I just have to take it week-by-week
and as long as I see steady improvement, by the time Sacramento [the Olympic
trials in July] comes around, I'll be ready to run."
Jones will take part in both the 4x100 and 4x200 relays today in the popular
U.S. versus the World format that begins to sort out the American relay pool
for Athens. She knows the drill here, knows the unique, extended nature of the
Franklin Field homestretch - "you just keep running" - and has been
part of the record-holding teams in all the marquee women's relay events.
This is a little like coming home for Jones, as it is for many track athletes.
The crowd will stand and roar today, and for some very special runners, the
"wooooo" that follows the great burst of an elite anchor leg around
the last turn will echo in their ears all their lives.
There is definitely plenty to worry about in track and field at the moment.
But it will have trouble getting inside these brick walls today.
"Everybody's concerned about Marion, and I appreciate the concern,"
Jones said. "But I'm doing quite well."