Beauty is truth, truth is beauty...
Here's a shot from my personal archive, Marion Jones and Lauryn Williams talking to the press after the first heat of the 4x100 at the Athens Games. It was a breakout Olympics for Williams, who won a silver medal in the women's 100 and became an instant star, and a huge disappointment for Jones, arguably America's biggest female track and field star ever, finishing without a medal just four years after she stole the Sydney Games with a breathtaking five-medal performance.
This picture is ironic in retrospect - two stars on different trajectories. I remember the two of them working the press line almost like a comedy team after that race. They always made such a startling twosome standing together, Jones towering a full head over the short, powerfully built Williams. As always, I was starstruck to be so close to Jones - she is stunningly beautiful in person. I remember how easy and carefree she was that night, and then I remember her and Williams after the relay final, arm in arm, consoling each other after a baton fumble between them cost their team a medal. Jones broke down in a press conference soon afterwards, the Athens Games capping off a year that saw her mired in the ugliness of the BALCO scandal.
Watching Marion Jones at the Sydney Olympics is one of the most powerful memories of my sporting life. I was on the finish line for both the women's 100 and 200 final, and I don't think I have ever seen an athlete more effortless and graceful in victory. It's a great parlor game at the Olympics amongst the media to speculate who is on the juice and who isn't. Writers are more cynical than anyone in this regard, and usually with good reason. They are too closely acquainted with the ruthlessness of the athlete's daily grind not to believe, and sometimes simply to know, what athletes are willing to do to succeed.
That said, even at an Olympics where Jones' husband at the time, the shotputter C.J. Hunter, tested positive for nandrolone, I never heard anyone suggest that Jones was juicing. I am no expert, but I never would have thought this. Her body looked like a natural, and not a man-made marvel. Her musculature, unlike so many of her peers, was not dense and ripped to Hulk-like proportions. She looked then like a human gazelle, tall and lithe and lean, born to run, and the margins by which she was outsprinting her opponents seemed far beyond that which chemistry could provide.
Of course, that's all in doubt now, and on this count, I must say, I've taken Marion Jones a hundred times harder than the McGwires and Giambis of the world. Although it's all of a piece. Jones has never tested positive, there is no hard proof of her steroid use, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, and it's fair to say that her reputation may never recover.
And neither, I'm afraid, will my memories. Jones is on the comeback trail this year - last I read she had the fastest time in the 100 yet this year, and has won the race in two meets in 2006. She's a late entry in the 100 at the meet tomorrow out on Randalls Island, and when I read that today, read that she and Williams would go head to head in their marquee event, I got a momentary surge of excitement and thought I might go.
But then I said fuck it. I have other shit to do, and in my private little world, Marion Jones and not Barry Bonds is the poster child of the steroids disaster, and I can do without that blast from the past, thank you very much. If you ARE truly clean, Marion, I apologize for this, but for me, our love affair has been over for years. All your magic has been replaced in my heart by a quotidian awareness that all too often beauty is a lie.
This picture is ironic in retrospect - two stars on different trajectories. I remember the two of them working the press line almost like a comedy team after that race. They always made such a startling twosome standing together, Jones towering a full head over the short, powerfully built Williams. As always, I was starstruck to be so close to Jones - she is stunningly beautiful in person. I remember how easy and carefree she was that night, and then I remember her and Williams after the relay final, arm in arm, consoling each other after a baton fumble between them cost their team a medal. Jones broke down in a press conference soon afterwards, the Athens Games capping off a year that saw her mired in the ugliness of the BALCO scandal.
Watching Marion Jones at the Sydney Olympics is one of the most powerful memories of my sporting life. I was on the finish line for both the women's 100 and 200 final, and I don't think I have ever seen an athlete more effortless and graceful in victory. It's a great parlor game at the Olympics amongst the media to speculate who is on the juice and who isn't. Writers are more cynical than anyone in this regard, and usually with good reason. They are too closely acquainted with the ruthlessness of the athlete's daily grind not to believe, and sometimes simply to know, what athletes are willing to do to succeed.
That said, even at an Olympics where Jones' husband at the time, the shotputter C.J. Hunter, tested positive for nandrolone, I never heard anyone suggest that Jones was juicing. I am no expert, but I never would have thought this. Her body looked like a natural, and not a man-made marvel. Her musculature, unlike so many of her peers, was not dense and ripped to Hulk-like proportions. She looked then like a human gazelle, tall and lithe and lean, born to run, and the margins by which she was outsprinting her opponents seemed far beyond that which chemistry could provide.
Of course, that's all in doubt now, and on this count, I must say, I've taken Marion Jones a hundred times harder than the McGwires and Giambis of the world. Although it's all of a piece. Jones has never tested positive, there is no hard proof of her steroid use, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, and it's fair to say that her reputation may never recover.
And neither, I'm afraid, will my memories. Jones is on the comeback trail this year - last I read she had the fastest time in the 100 yet this year, and has won the race in two meets in 2006. She's a late entry in the 100 at the meet tomorrow out on Randalls Island, and when I read that today, read that she and Williams would go head to head in their marquee event, I got a momentary surge of excitement and thought I might go.
But then I said fuck it. I have other shit to do, and in my private little world, Marion Jones and not Barry Bonds is the poster child of the steroids disaster, and I can do without that blast from the past, thank you very much. If you ARE truly clean, Marion, I apologize for this, but for me, our love affair has been over for years. All your magic has been replaced in my heart by a quotidian awareness that all too often beauty is a lie.
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