IOC strips Marion Jones of 5 medals

LAUSANNE (Switzerland)—The IOC formally stripped Marion Jones of her five Olympic medals Wednesday, wiping her name from the record books following her admission that she was a drug cheat.
The International Olympic Committee also banned the disgraced American athlete from attending next year’s Beijing Olympics in any capacity and said it could bar her from all future games.
Jones had already handed back the three gold medals and two bronze she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations erased all of Jones’ results dating to September 2000, but it was up to the IOC to formally disqualify her and erase her Olympic medals.
The decision was announced by IOC president Jacques Rogge at the end of a three-day executive board meeting. Jones won gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters and 1,600-meter relay in Sydney, and bronze in the long jump and 100-meter relay. She was the first female track and field athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics. In addition to those medals, the IOC also disqualified Jones from her 7th-place finish in the long jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
The IOC postponed a decision on redistributing her medals, including whether to strip her American relay teammates and whether to upgrade doping-tainted Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou to gold in the 100. After long denying she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted in federal court in October that she started using steroids before the Sydney Games. She said she’d used the designer steroid “the clear” from September 2000 to July 2001.
The executive board declared Jones ineligible for the Beijing Games “not only as an athlete but also in any other capacity.” Jones has retired as an athlete and is banned by U.S. officials from competition for two years. But the IOC wants to keep her from going to the Olympics as a coach or in any other role, and said she could face a lifetime Olympic ban pending the outcome of the BALCO investigation. Jones’ doping admission came as part of her guilty plea to lying to federal investigators in the BALCO case about using steroids. She will be sentenced on Jan. 11 and is expected to face a term of between three and six months. Jones becomes the fourth American athlete in Olympic history to have a medal taken away by the IOC, and the third for a doping offense.
Jerome Young was stripped of his 1,600-meter relay gold from the Sydney Games for an earlier doping violation; swimmer Rick DeMont lost his gold in the 400-meter freestyle from the 1972 Munich Games after testing positive for a banned substance in his asthma medication, and Jim Thorpe was stripped of his pentathlon and decathlon gold medals in 1912 when it was revealed he earned US$25 a week playing minor league baseball. The IOC reinstated Thorpe in 1982 and returned his medals to his children the following year.
The reshuffling of Jones’ medals could affect the medal status of more than three dozen other athletes. IOC officials said they need more details from the ongoing BALCO probe to determine whether any other Olympic athletes were linked to the scandal.
There is reluctance among some IOC officials to upgrade Thanou, who finished second behind Jones in the 100. Thanou later served a two-year ban after failing to show for drug tests in the leadup to the 2004 Athens Olympics.—Agencies