Track down real winners
Jones shouldn't get to keep her ill-gotten medals -- nor should any athlete who used performance-enhancing drugs in any sport, no matter how long ago
Why did Marion Jones finally confess that she is a cheater after all these years of arrogant denial?
Because she realized it's not we wimpy press members or angry and impotent competitors or dubious sports authorities who are after her now.
It's the feds.
These are the big boys with subpoena power, perjury charges, fines and prison time as their prods.
Jones, the former ''fastest woman in the world,'' the only female to win five track medals in one Olympics, had been so defiant in the past that she wrote in huge red letters in her 2004 autobiography, Life in the Fast Lane: ''I AM AGAINST PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS. I HAVE NEVER TAKEN THEM AND I NEVER WILL.''
Though caught up in the BALCO steroid investigations and now charged with lying to investigators, Jones -- who has been associated romantically with doper/athletes C.J. Hunter and Tim Montgomery and trained under slippery coaches such as Trevor Graham -- also called the United States Anti-Doping Association (USADA) ''a kangaroo court'' and said she needed the U.S. Senate to help her prove her innocence.
The federal court may be a lot of things, but it ain't kangaroo.
And lawmakers sure can't help her now.
People say it is piling on to make Jones, whose reputation is ruined, give up the prize money and Olympic medals she won while using performance-enhancing drugs.
No, it is unconscionable not to do that.
For far too long and in far too many venues of sport, competitors have been able to do things illicit, reap the benefits and only years later be sanctioned, if at all, and still never worry about losing the material things they won.
Enough of that.
Jones giving back everything she got unfairly is only the start of what should happen.
And that Passion Richardson, one of her 400-meter relay teammates in the 2000 Sydney Games, has said she wants to keep the bronze medal from that relay because ''I competed fairly'' is irrelevant and nonsensical.
Not just Jones but two other members of the relay team -- Chryste Gaines and Tori Edwards -- have been nailed for doping.
Where would Richardson have finished with a clean team?
You are who you run with.
Which brings up a little sticking point as officials try to make these things right: What if the athletes who now will move up and get the medals they should have won because of Jones' abdication are themselves dirty?
For instance, Jones won the gold medal in the 100 meters in Sydney, with the silver going to Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou.
Thanou and countryman Kostas Kenteris, the 200-meter gold medalist in Sydney and the first Greek male sprinter to win an Olympic gold in 108 years, bolted the 2004 Athens Games like rats down a sewer.
They never came back, and word is they feared the new drug-testing devices that would have caught them in their own doping deceit.
The dirtiness of elite Olympic athletes is not just lore, but fact.
I watched at those proud and beautiful Athens Games, sitting only feet from the shot put event held at the ancient Olympic site of Olympus in the stadium ruins once anointed by the gods.
Irina Korzhanenko, the Russian winner of the women's shot put -- the first female winner of anything at Olympus in all of history -- said after her gold-medal throw, ''The stadium inspires us.''
No, the juice did. And soon she was stripped of the gold.
But beyond finding the rightful owners of the medals Jones has defaulted upon, what of all the rest of the wronged Olympians through the years?
In all sports.
''If they're going to do it with Marion Jones, they have opened a Pandora's box,'' says Chuck Wielgus, executive director of USA Swimming, who has long begged the International Olympic Committee to reissue all women's swimming medals awarded during the disgraced East German swimming era that spanned at least from 1972 to 1988. ''We, basically, had given up. But now, well, 'Away we go!'''
Shirley Babashoff -- dubbed ''Surly Shirley'' for complaining that heavily steroided East German women had mustaches and deep voices, not to mention bizarre muscles -- finished in second place in the 1976 Olympics to juiced East German swimmers -- four times.
What of her, and many other ''losers'' from many other countries?
''There's an eight-year statute of limitations,'' says Rich Young, the legal counsel for the USOC and a drug-doping legal expert. ''When I was the principal draftsman for the World Anti-Doping code, adopted at the World Conference on Doping in Copenhagen in 2003, there was a lot of initial complaint about going past eight years, especially in Europe. I think in Norway there's an eight-year statute of limitations for murder.''
Young chuckles, reflecting.
''I really am against doping, but it's not worse than murder.''
Still, Young agrees the statute could be changed.
''We're doing amendments as we speak,'' he says.
Darryl Seibel is the chief communications officer for the USOC, and he admits upfront that this has not been a fun week, that there was no joy for him in Jones' demise.
''Every national sports committee in the world received a letter from us this week, saying we apologized,'' he says. ''We told them, 'You deserved better than this.'''
He knows about all the duped and emotionally wounded athletes from the past who were cheated of their rightful place in history.
''What do you do?'' he asks. ''No way you can replace what they lost. They were denied hearing their anthem on the platform, the thrill of victory, the joy of competition that was clean and done with honor and done the right way.
''How do you repay that? Making an unwavering commitment to see it doesn't happen in the future is a start.''
Changing the statute and giving out the real medals as far back as needed would be the perfect finish.