At the pinnacle of her success, Olympic sprinter Marion Jones set records for female athletes, signed multimillion-dollar endorsement deals and adorned the covers of national magazines.
Vogue declared her "The New American Hero" in a cover story featuring Jones in a $2,000 designer dress.
But seven summers after her dominance of the Sydney Games, where she won a women's record five medals -- three of them gold -- Jones has disappeared from track and field. Her days of competitive glory have given way to suspicions of performance-enhancing drug use.
And now comes word that she's heavily in debt, fighting off court judgments and down to a bank account balance that could barely cover the tab for that Vogue designer dress.
According to recent court records, reviewed by The Times, Jones says that her millions of dollars are gone and that she has "total liquid assets throughout the world" of about $2,000.
Last year, she said, a bank foreclosed on her $2.5-million chateau-style "dream home" in an area of Chapel Hill, N.C., where Michael Jordan and Dean Smith were among her neighbors.
And this year, records show, Jones sold two other North Carolina houses, including one where her mother lived, raising "money to pay bills," she said.
Jones conceded having no financial recovery plan but also said she wasn't worried. "I pray that God will bless me and my needs will be taken care of," she testified in an April deposition.
The supposedly dismal state of her financial health is described by Jones in a 168-page deposition, part of a breach-of-contract suit she filed in Dallas against veteran track coach Dan Pfaff.
Unfortunately for Jones, Pfaff countersued and won a judgment for about $240,000 in unpaid training fees and legal expenses.
"You made some good money. Where did that money go?" asked a skeptical Pfaff attorney, Eric Little.
"Who knows? I wish I knew. Bills, attorney bills, a lot of different things to maintain the lifestyle," Jones said.
In fact, legal bills have been a growing burden on Jones' finances. She has been involved in a rash of litigation since 2003, when she was linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) after a federal raid.
Jones has since retained attorneys for her BALCO grand jury testimony, for negotiations with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in her fight to avoid being banned from competition, for a defamation lawsuit she filed against BALCO founder Victor Conte, who accused her of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and for taking on Pfaff in her breach-of-contract suit.
