Marion Jones
USATF CEO Douglas Logan has written an open letter to President Bush urging him not to pardon Marion Jones for her illegal and unethical activities over the past decade.
I can not agree with him more and I plan on writing to the white house with my thoughts on the matter. Marion Jones broke the law, she cheated in her profession, and she lied about both for years.
There should be no double standards for athletes when compared to average citizens of the United States, and pardoning Jones will make us laughing stocks in the international track community. If you think that cycling as a sport gets a bad rap, wait until the United States takes a lenient stance against an admitted doper that broke multiple US laws including involvement in bank fraud.
Pardoning her sends the wrong message, and I think that she should take responsibility for the choices that she has made.
If you would like to send a letter to the White House, you can address it to the following address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
If you would like to call the White House to voice your concerns, you can dial 202-456-1111 (or 202-456-6213 for TTY service.) To send a fax, dial 202-456-2461.
If you would like to send an email, address it to: [email protected]
The USATF has provided a sample email/letter that you can use when communicating with the White House about your thoughts on offering Marion Jones a pardon:
http://www.usatf.org/promotions/MarionJones/
Click through to read the rest of this entry for Douglas Logan’s open letter to the President.
Dear President Bush,
They say you can’t always believe what you read in the papers. So, when I read that Marion Jones has applied to you for a pardon or commutation of her federal conviction for making false statements to investigators, I couldn’t believe it. She lied to federal agents. She took steroids. She made false statements in a bank fraud investigation – not necessarily in that order. She admitted it. And now she apparently wants to be let off.
As the new CEO of USA Track & Field, I have a moral and practical duty to make the case against her request.
With her cheating and lying, Marion Jones did everything she could to violate the principles of track and field and Olympic competition. When she came under scrutiny for doping, she taunted any who doubted her purity, talent and work ethic. Just as she had succeeded in duping us with her performances, she duped many people into giving her the benefit of the doubt.
She pointed her finger at us, and got away with it until federal investigators teamed up with USADA and finally did her in. It was a sad thing to watch, the most glorious female athlete of the 20th century in tears on courthouse steps.
Our country has long turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of our heroes. If you have athletic talent or money or fame, the law is applied much differently than if you are slow or poor or an average American trying to get by. At the same time, all sports have for far too long given the benefit of the doubt to its heroes who seem too good to be true, even when common sense indicates they are not.
To reduce Ms. Jones’ sentence or pardon her would send a horrible message to young people who idolized her, reinforcing the notion that you can cheat and be entitled to get away with it. A pardon would also send the wrong message to the international community. Few things are more globally respected than the Olympic Games, and to pardon one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the Olympic movement would be nothing less than thumbing our collective noses at the world.
In my new job as CEO of USA Track & Field, I must right the ship that Ms. Jones and other athletes nearly ran aground. I implore you, Mr. President: Please don’t take the wind out of our sails.
Respectfully Yours,
Douglas G. Logan
CEO, USA Track & Field
(Source: USATF (Sample Email) – Photo: BBC)
I agree with you. Let her rot in jail as long as possible.
That’s a little harsh Jamie, surely? We’re talking athletics here. She didn’t murder anybody.
I don’t think she should be pardoned, but there’s a blatant hypocrisy in all this. Any reasonable analysis will show that nobody has broken 10 seconds in the men’s 100m dash that probably wasn’t drug-assisted. Tyson Gay’s recent wind-assisted 9.68 was a full tenth of a second faster than Ben Johnson’s 1988 drug-enhanced performance. Let’s not be naive about this – every person who lines up in the 100m final at Beijing, man or woman, is using illegal substances.
(And in most of the other events, too. I believe it’s still true that in all of the world of sports, only field hockey and figure skating have never had an athlete fail a drug test.)
It’s only a level playing field if you’re taking the same stuff as everybody else. Nobody can compete ‘naturally’ anymore; you won’t even make the finals at the Olympic level, let alone have a chance to win it.
Jones got caught, and so did Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery and Johnson. But that’s the only thing that separates these guys from their peers – that they failed a test.
What I don’t like is people making Jones out to be some kind of demon because the reality is she’s no different than anybody else. Even with what she was taking she still couldn’t get anywhere near Florence Griffith-Joyner’s times. Jones did herself no favours in the way she acted, but what was she really going to do – own up? Nobody does that until they’re busted. Too much to lose, too much at stake, and too much pressure to win. But the media needs a spacegoat, some way to take the eyes off of everybody else. Johnson was this person forever, and then Jones become public enemy number one (and to a lesser extent Mark McGuire and pro baseball as a whole).
Much like the Tour, there’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy going on here. The guy finishing number two or number ten behind Lance Armstrong fails but people seem to cling on to the infinitely small possibility that Armstrong himself recovers from cancer and wins seven straight tours racing clean. I mean: really? 😉
It’s an impossible situation, because nobody wants to see a 100m final where the winner runs 10:10 because everybody is 100 per cent drug free. TV audiences demand world records, but without chemical enhancements, you not only will never see a sprint world record again, you won’t see the athletes going anywhere *near* current times.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but clearly the athletes are mostly one step ahead of the testers. My opinion is the powers-that-be scapegoat some people while sparing others – rumours have persisted for years that six of the athletes in the 1988 final failed their tests, including Carl Lewis, but the Olympic Committee feared it would ruin the sport beyond repair. But I think that only the truly naive think top-level athletics is clean (or any professional sport, for that matter).
I’m not sure we can ever have a world where an ‘anything is allowed’ approach to athletic competition would work, but clearly whatever we have isn’t working now. There’s a really fine line here – audiences want records, and TV networks want the audiences. To keep both parties happy, the athletes need drugs. Otherwise, athletics is dead. But as the Tour increasingly becomes more and more of a farce, ultimately every new world record (in pretty much any sport) is always clouded in suspicion. It’s an impossible situation, but I’m not sure that vilifying one athlete is ever the answer.
Well, that and she was involved in bank fraud and impeding federal investigations into such.
On a more serious note, I don’t believe that every athlete in Beijing is doping. I’m not quite that cynical yet. And getting caught is a HUGE difference. If you get caught, then you should face the consequences, and those consequences should be harsh.
Until you are caught, though, the athletes have rights and they shouldn’t be scapegoated and assumed to be cheaters. If they do cheat, then they deserve whatever they get.
I agree – I don’t think she should be pardoned, as said. But I do think a little bit of common sense needs to come into play regarding her use of illegal supplements. I don’t like seeing people overly demonised I guess.
Not every athlete who lines up in Beijing will be a cheat, no. But everyone in the finals, will be, certainly in the sprinting events. As said you simply cannot compete clean at the top level otherwise. And even then it’s sometimes not always enough. Nobody is saying the drugs alone make everybody a 9.68 runner – that’s foolish. But Tyson Gay isn’t a 9.68 runner without that magical combination of X, Y and Z.
In an ideal, drug free world I’m pretty sure the final placings in this year’s 100m final would be roughly the same. The only difference is the times would be perhaps as much as half a second slower.
Too right I say.
Over here in the UK we’ve recently had a case with one of our sprinters Dwain Chambers.
He was trying to overturn the British Olympic Committees decision which bans all UK drug cheat athletes competing in the Olympics for life – he took it all the way to the High Court, fortunately common sense prevailed.
This guy cost his 3 team mates a gold 4×4 100m medal because of his stupidity.
Unfortunately the combination of Money + Fame, and the highly competitive nature of top level athletics is always going to lead some down the wrong path.
Ian
Sad, sad, sad…a tremendous athlete tries to take ownership and the holier than thou feel it is their place to destroy them completely along with anybody implicated, coaches or athletes that have not had thier day in court. Purely accusational slander has ruined many people in this psort with no concrete evidence for many of them. Marion Jones is twice the man than Alex Rodriguez, Mark Maguire, Barry Bonds…should I keep naming them. Even more sad, several of our best technical coaches have been slandered and black balled with no solid proof. What a joke! We’ve had Heisman Trophy killers, the head of our CIA blame Ollie North, one President ‘not recall’, another President drop a quarter, and yet another start a war under false pretenses that may have been the biggest domino in our current economic depression. I am sick of the presses ability to imply truths and prosecute people that are innocent until proven guilty. Let’s be real—there is no money in track and field, the purest athletic sport in the world. So, what are these athletes benefitting, or worse yet, their coaches that get paid so little they have to live like poor college students? Arrogance in leadership or abuse of power at any level benefits no one, including the USATF. I want to know absolute truths, not implied truths. And, like always, the ones at the top lose focus of those at the bottom or those that have coached our athletes to monumental heights. Somebody, anybody, give me absolute evidence that all of the people supposedly involved with BALCO did indeed instruct their athletes to take illegal substances to improve their performance. Send your ‘absolute court acquired evidence’ to [email protected]
That includes you, Mr. Logan