Electronic Telegraph Thursday 28 September 2000 Paul Hayward THE AUSTRALIAN papers are calling them beauty and the beast. While the beast was plodding into infamy, shedding tears and signing up O J Simpson's lawyer, the beauty was scorching closer to five Olympic golds at these Games. How fast would Marion Jones be if she was not weighed down by her husband, the newly lachrymose C J Hunter? Never mind the golds, Jones is in line for an Oscar after marching into the Olympic Stadium with chin raised and thespian's mask on. She floated through her 200 metres heat then qualified for the long jump final with her first leap. "When I stepped on the track the events of the past two days were pushed to the back of my head," she said. "I'm here to take care of business." The previous day, she had squeezed into a seat next to her shot-putting husband, and promised us that there would be a perfectly good explanation why C J had tested a thousand times over the limit for the anabolic steroid nandrolone at the Oslo Golden League Meeting on July 28. Four explanations, in fact, because Hunter failed four separate tests before pulling out of the Olympics to have an operation on his knee, the evidence of which he will happily show you if you ask him to roll up his trousers. For Jones, 'business' means the 100m, which she has already won, the 200m (the semi-finals were early this morning British time), the long jump and the 4x100m and 4x400m relays. She says she has received hundreds of letters, cards and e-mails saying: "You're in our prayers. Go out there are prove them all wrong." If she knew nothing of her husband's alleged activities, and has never partaken herself, she has become the tragic heroine of these Games. The normally truculent Hunter, meanwhile, has stopped scowling and started howling. Tears, his innocence, the lot. With the International Olympic Committee's medical commission saying that it would be impossible to be a thousand times over the limit from taking a contaminated iron supplement, as Hunter claims, he could, in the figurative sense, end up wearing the cannonball he throws for a living on a chain attached to his foot. The key theme of the last few days has been plausibility. Hunter is out to convince the watching world that he has fallen into a maelstrom not of his making, and has hired Simpson's counsel, Johnnie Cochrane, to haul him out. After his wife's regal performance on the track yesterday, Hunter was seen outside the stadium posing for photographs with children. In these situations, the accused are always advised by image consultants to do three things: look shocked and hurt, show their human side then hire an armadillo lawyer to go into battle. After she won the 100m on Saturday, Jones came back into the mixed zone, took her tracksuit top from Hunter then sat on a bench and cried. At that point Hunter's test results had not been made public, but she looked as if she knew what was coming next. And come it did. "The only way to have such levels [of nandrolone] is by injection or by taking pills," said Jacques Rogge, vice-president of the IOC. As the scandal spread, USA Track and Field, the governing body for the sport in America, faced renewed pressure to disclose details of 15 or more alleged positive tests which Olympic officials accuse them of suppressing. There is a strong anti-American feeling in Sydney this week. It surfaced when the IAAF's chief medical expert, Professor Arne Ljunqvist, accused the American national federation of protecting cheats, some of whom were allowed to compete in Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta. The allegations are sufficiently serious for the head of President Clinton's anti-drugs campaign to have written to the US federation urging them to name names. General Barry McCaffrey helped drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but purging the American federation of secrecy and hypocrisy might prove a much bigger job. The idea that American athletes exist in a separate moral universe is intolerable to many Olympic countries, and especially to the smaller ones routinely busted for drugs. Initially the US Olympic Committee revoked Hunter's accreditation, but then tried to get it back on the grounds that he had not "been convicted of any offence". It all leaves Jones in a twilight world of innuendo and suspicion. The assumption of guilt by association is a rotten slur in the absence of any evidence to support it. But she must know that the crowd in Sydney will take less pleasure now from seeing her dominate her contemporaries. Sometimes when a drugs scandal breaks it is hard to spot anybody who is not putting on a performance. Jones certainly is, both in the athletic sense and by suppressing the trauma she must feel through every waking hour. "That's where I love to be - out there in front of the fans and under the lights. It takes my mind off everything," she said. How many great actresses have said that? "It's been a difficult time but having my family here has helped." She finished a comfortable second, easing down, to Melinda Gainsford-Taylor in the second round of the 200m and jumped 6.78m in the pit. "This morning when I got up, I wanted to focus on everything, and that's what I've done. I said all along that this was going to be my toughest day. I've run two heats of the 200m and popped my first long jump. I'm pleased with that." On her face was an unforced smile that was the product of either blamelessness or denial. She was wrong about one thing. Her toughest days are still to come. Eamonn Condon WWW.RunnersGoal.com
