Chasing The Truth

By Joel Stein

Even if you're the fastest couple in the world, there are certain things you can't outrun--like Johnny Law. So Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the sprinting champions, find themselves caught in the center of a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation into steroid use by athletes. Both deny taking banned performance-enhancing drugs, and neither has been formally charged. Still, as the allegations spread all the way up Olympus to the U.S.'s top track-and-field stars, it looks as if either we'll be sending a scandal-tainted team to the Games or those of you with decent running shoes can score a free ticket to Athens.

Jones and her attorneys requested a meeting last week with investigators and learned the extent of the evidence against her. Their conclusion: it is too weak to keep her from competing in the Olympics. Jones has, in fact, threatened to sue if she is barred from Athens without a positive drug test. No athlete has ever been barred without such proof, but the USADA does have the power to use other evidence, called a nonanalytical positive, to link an athlete to banned substances.

That kind of evidence might include the documents emerging these days from the offices of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), a San Francisco--area company that is the target of a federal investigation into steroid distribution and money laundering. BALCO is responsible for creating THG (tetrahydrogestrinone, for you Olympic fans keeping illegal-drug box scores at home), a steroid that was designed to elude detection on doping tests. BALCO also makes a perfectly legal mineral supplement called ZMA (mostly zinc and magnesium), which it got famous athletes to mention in public a lot (Jones has touted it and still takes it).

The San Mateo Narcotics Task Force and the IRS raided BALCO last September and carted off enough boxes of evidence to ban four U.S. track-and-field athletes and start investigating nine more. Two weeks ago, the USADA got sprinter Kelli White to confess to using a series of banned drugs, accept a two-year suspension from the sport and agree to help with the investigation. Jones and Montgomery were among 27 athletes reportedly named by BALCO founder Victor Conte as having received THG, according to a federal investigator's memo. Conte denies making that admission. What the USADA showed Jones and her attorneys last week were BALCO notebooks that contain circumstantial evidence, such as a training calendar with the initials M.J. and letters whose meaning is not clear but that may be abbreviations for certain steroids. While that may not look good for Jones, it's equally possible that Michael Jackson has just been bulking up with nutritional supplements.

Under equal scrutiny from the USADA is Jones' boyfriend, Montgomery. "[He is] getting smeared by rumor and innuendo," says his lawyer, Cristina Arguedas, who objects to the USADA's unprecedented threat to bar an athlete from competition without an admission of drug taking or a urine sample that tested positive for illegal substances. "He's never had a dirty drug test in his life." As of last week, the USADA hadn't contacted Montgomery.

This isn't the kind of publicity Jones and Montgomery are used to. The pair, who have trained together since 1999, first got close in 2001 after an airline lost Montgomery's luggage and he borrowed Jones' shoes for a meet. (His feet are only one size bigger than hers.) That was less than a year after Jones' then husband shot-putter C.J. Hunter got busted at the 2000 Olympics for taking steroids. (The New York Times reported that Hunter wrote a $7,350 check from Jones' account to BALCO in 2000, according to two sources with knowledge of the check.) Jones, 28, divorced him and surprised fans when she kissed Montgomery, 29, on the finish line in Paris in September 2002 after Montgomery broke the 100-m-dash world record. Compared with track and field, Hollywood seems like a healthy environment for couples.

Since then, the world's fastest couple have been the sport's darlings. They're good-looking, they win, they share shoes, and they've now had a baby together, Monty, who can undoubtedly crawl with alacrity. They even have each other's names tattooed on their arms. Jones--who is so good that when she got three golds and two bronzes at the Olympics in 2000, she considered it a disappointment--is charismatic, does charity work and constantly signs autographs for kids. She's known for her intensity. "Marion's work ethic was like none I've ever seen," says veteran sports journalist Ron Rapoport, author of See How She Runs: Marion Jones and the Making of a Champion.

Montgomery is known for his cockiness, claims that his mother once chased a rabbit until its heart exploded and has ordered a vanity plate that reads 9.75, which is three-hundredths of a second under his world-record time in the 100-m dash. His Rocky-style ascent to the top of sprinting came after he gained 28 lbs. and increased his bench press by 80 lbs. in just eight weeks. In two years he went from being No. 8 in the world to breaking Maurice Greene's 100-m world record. Jones' times, as her lawyers keep reminding everyone, have been consistently improving since she was in high school.

But neither of them helped their reputations by working, briefly, with coach Charlie Francis, who was the trainer for sprinter Ben Johnson when he was caught with steroids in the 1988 Olympics. Francis later admitted that he incorporated drugs into Johnson's workouts.

Athletes and officials in the world of track and field hope the current investigations reach the finish line swiftly. "It's in the interest of the sport that whatever the evidence is, that it come out and the convicted be kicked out of our sport as soon as possible, " says Craig Masback, CEO of USA Track & Field.

Former Olympian and longtime track-and-field TV commentator Dwight Stones, 50, says steroids pervaded the sport as far back as the 1970s. In 1976, he says, he was tempted to take dianabol, an earlier steroid, at the Olympics. But "it wasn't enough of a guarantee of improvement that I was willing to risk breaking the rules and potentially impacting my children or grandchildren," he says. One fair solution, as Stones sees it, would be to "legalize all steroids. That would surely level the playing field." While that might be an easy fix, it would turn sports into a test to see whose liver processed drugs best, a world where the long-jump record could be held by Keith Richards.

James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has both prosecuted and defended track-and-field athletes in steroid cases, suggests that labs save all urine samples to prevent athletes from staying one step ahead of the authorities by using ever newer steroids and masking agents. "They could preserve the sample," he says. "Take a sample after every athlete wins a major race or sets a world record. And as you develop new tests, test a portion. If the athlete cheated, you can always take back the record. You can always take back the victory." But that solution overlooks one important thing: you can't take back the time sports fans may have spent watching steroid-tainted athletes.

--Reported by Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Deirdre van Dyk/New York

With reporting by Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Deirdre van Dyk/New York