Before donning boxing gloves and a headguard, Marion Jones did an earnest piece to camera, in the practiced manner of a woman dealing with media obligations since her time long ago as California’s teen sprinting phenom.
Styling herself as an unlikely middle-aged scrapper, she talked about how during her stint in jail she got into an altercation with another inmate that earned her 49 days in solitary confinement. No humble brag.
“If I have to fight,” she said, “I will fight.”
When she squared up to Kayla Nicole, an opponent described as model, influencer and former girlfriend of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, her experience of hand-to-hand combat in the clink didn’t count for much.
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As the two women flailed wildly at each other with more enthusiasm than skill, the younger Nicole landed cleaner hits and 49-year-old Jones eventually crumbled to the ground clutching her ribs, complaining of pain and shortness of breath.
That was her final, ignominious contribution to Fox TV’s Special Forces – World’s Toughest Test, one of those shows in which celebrities of various wattages and vintage endure physical and mental torture to entertain the masses and resuscitate their flagging brands.
Reality television is the last refuge of too many scoundrels, and a quarter of a century since the Summer of Marion yielded five Olympic medals in Sydney, the most famous distaff drug cheat of all returned to America’s screens, a dreadlocked mother of three, ex-con turned personal coach and motivational speaker.
“I can’t go back and change things,” she said. “But I’ve come here to set an example for my kiddos that courage is stepping out when you don’t want to with the possibility that there’s going to be critics, there’s going to be opinions, but you just don’t disappear.”
Even for those of us who watched her starring role in one of athletics’ ugliest and all-too regular steroid scandals, there was something almost sad about this cameo.
A woman that history might well have remembered as the world’s fastest reduced now to arse-boxing a content creator for the price of a few weeks back in the national spotlight. It can be legitimately argued this is exactly where she deserves to be for her sins but there is a nagging sense too that Jones suffered a lot more than some other celebrated drug cheats of her generation.
Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Lance Armstrong all perpetrated sporting fraud on a similar scale to her yet none ever did jail time for their myriad wrongdoings. Having once served 30 days house detention in his mansion, Bonds is special adviser to the San Francisco Giants CEO and works with the club’s most promising youngsters at spring training.
Armstrong, somehow, remains a hero to the current crop of amnesiac cyclists and his podcast was a vaunted element of NBC’s coverage of the Tour de France last summer. Rodriguez is the face of televised baseball in America. Each of them is still coining it, the stench apparently long since evaporated from their soiled reputations.
Once Victor Conte blew up Jones’s scam in the Balco affair, Olympic officials came to her house to repossess the medals. She didn’t even have time to troll her enemies by posing with her trophies à la the infamous shot of Armstrong in his crib with his maillot jaunes.
A Texas judge sentenced her to six months in prison and 800 hours community service for lying to federal authorities about steroid usage, and cheque fraud. A one-time college basketball star, upon release, she dabbled briefly in the WNBA, averaging just under three points a game, before fading from public view for nearly a decade and a half.
Twice-divorced Jones re-emerged last summer, taking to Instagram to announce she was in a long-term and happy relationship with a woman. There followed a revealing interview with SELF magazine, during which she was asked what counsel she might offer to today’s female athletes.
“My advice would be to, number one, make sure that they are surrounding themselves with people who have their best interest at heart,” said Jones, who went from earning $80,000 per race to bankruptcy.
“It becomes very easy, especially if you’re young, for so many people to see you as a dollar sign. And they become what I like to call ‘yes people’ − who will say yes . . . no matter what. Even if it’s a poor choice, or it’s not the right company to align with. They’re like, ‘Yes, that’s great'.”
In the accompanying photo spread, she wore Adidas, Reebok, and Puma gear. Significantly, not a swoosh to be seen. Nike made tens of millions off her in her prime, as it did from the tarnished achievements of Bonds, Rodriguez, Armstrong, and so many other chemically-enhanced swindlers. Nobody has ever sold ersatz greatness to gullible fans through slick, cloying television commercials better than Phil Knight’s snake oil merchants.
“This communique is from Mrs Jones,” she said, in a 2000 Nike ad where she lectured America’s athletes about misbehaviour.
“Friends, enough is enough, the drug use, the spousal abuse, the violence, it’s got to stop. Whether you want responsibility or not, you are a role model. I know what Charles [Barkley] said, but you missed his point. He was calling for parents to get involved, he wasn’t giving you a licence to act the fool. We need more role models, the more the better. Can you dig it?”
That went down very well back then. Hits different now.
