For Marion Jones, the beatings will continue
The ex-Olympian lost her medals and will go to prison, but for some it's not enough.
When track star Marion Jones surrenders March 11 to serve a six-month jail sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan near Austin, Texas, a parade of journalists will line up to write the "serves her right" story. From the instant she confessed in October to doping before the Sydney Games in 2000, the disdain for her has been loud and animated, with references to Jones as the "disgraced Olympian" or the "fallen superstar." A column by the New York Times' George Vecsey was witheringly titled "No Sympathy Here, and That's No Lie." Even the judge who sentenced the 32-year-old mother of two seemed ticked off. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas tersely rejected leniency and instead explored imposing a jail term longer than what prosecutors recommended.
In baseball, as the recent congressional hearings have shown, the approach to handling cheaters has been much different. Former Sen. George Mitchell called out the illegal performance-enhancing drug users in his historic report but strongly urged Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to forgo punishment, saying that it would do no good now. "Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades -- commissioners, club officials, the players' association and players -- shares to some extent the responsibility for the steroids era," Mitchell said. "There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on."
Which leads to the question, what makes everybody so eager to damn Marion Jones for all time? Her transgressions were also in the past, and unlike the majority of baseball players implicated in the Mitchell Report, she has confessed to her wrongdoing. "What value is there in locking her up in prison when she is already serving a sentence of humiliation witnessed by people across the world?" asks a well-respected Austin-based blogger who reports on the state's criminal justice system. "What value is there, other than revenge?"
The demonizing of Jones is a troubling, hard-to-watch affair. At the time of her sentencing in January, a writer for the Nation of Islam Sportsblog -- yes, there is such a thing -- defended Jones, saying that the media's aggression was because she served the stereotype of the cheating athlete, "the cheating Negro athlete."
