Serial liar Jones sent to jail for six months

For almost 10 years, the sprinter who won three gold medals and two bronze at the 2000 Olympics, told anyone who asked that she was as clean, a naturally fast woman who had no need of performance enhancing substances.

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Many wanted to believe her. And those who could not do so, never had the proof because the analysts who tested the multitude of samples she gave could not provide it.

She was only undone when, with her customary arrogance, she told the same lies to federal investigators and a grand jury.

That was a perjury that could be proven. A 2003 search of the Balco laboratory in California had found ledgers, purchases, doping calendars and blood-test results connected to Jones and her former coach Trevor Graham.

Even that did not stop the lies. In letters of contrition to family and friends, admitting the charge, she still wanted them to believe she had thought Graham was giving her flaxseed oil and had only suspected foul play after she left him in 2002.

Court documents released since her guilty plea show it up as another travesty of the truth. They prove her former husband, CJ Hunter, and the Balco laboratory chief, Victor Conte, were right when they claimed to have seen her injecting herself with drugs. The documents revealed she took not only THG, the custom-made steroid known as the 'clear' because it could deceive the testers, but also EPO, human growth hormone and insulin.

Her lies did not stop with doping because she also denied to federal investigators any knowledge of the involvement of Tim Montgomery, the father of her son Monty, in a scheme to cash forged cheques for millions of dollars, a crime for which Montgomery has been convicted.

Yesterday in New York, judge Kenneth Karas sentenced her to six months. 'I ask you to be as merciful as a human being can be,' pleaded the mother-of-two, but it was the prosecutors who were given the sentence they requested.

Judge Karas even asked lawyers to advise him whether he could go beyond the six-month maximum specified in her plea deal and added two years' probation, supervised release and 800 hours of community service.

The sentence completes a stunning fall for the one-time most celebrated female athlete. She has lost her sponsors, her money, the five medals she has returned to Olympic chiefs and now her liberty.

George Williams, the U.S. Olympic track and field coach in 2004, said yesterday: 'It not only hurts me, but it hurts the world. Marion Jones was an outstanding young lady before all this happened.'