Sonia lost out to the drug cheats, but she won by a mile in the end

THE spectacular fall from grace of Marion Jones, the 32-year-old US sprinter who was sentenced to six months in prison last week for lying to federal prosecutors about her steroid use, is a reminder of how difficult it can be to take professional athletics seriously in the modern era.

The sentence imposed by a US district court was the final act in a tragedy (or perhaps farce) after the previous act last October when she sobbed her way through an apology to her family and fans.

It was the ultimate humiliation for the golden girl of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney where she won five medals — three of them gold. She was made fabulously wealthy through endorsements.

All her performances as of September 2000 have now been erased from the record books; she has been stripped of the medals and is now facing financial ruin.

I wonder what Sonia O’Sullivan made of it all.

Although athletics is a minority sport in this country, most Irish people will cherish the memory of the 2000 Olympics when O’Sullivan won a silver medal in the 5000 metres which, on top of her many other achievements, confirmed her status as the greatest ever Irish athlete.

But in watching her trials and triumphs over the years there was often the feeling that she had been robbed of more medals because of the activities of the drug cheats. O’Sullivan never pointed the finger of blame or whinged about what other athletes might be doing.

She just pushed herself harder and harder, saying: “I can’t accept there are things that I cannot do… I just think that if I work harder, I can do anything.”

This determination, as we all know, led to a temporary self-destruction and something approaching burnout that became heartbreakingly evident in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

Her resurrection was extraordinary, all the more so because she was a clean athlete who had to rely on her physical and mental resilience to recover and experience triumph once again.

But in one sense, it was the cheats who put incredible and at times intolerable pressure on people like Sonia; while she was working harder and harder, others were becoming more and more corrupt.

She was philosophical about this in the book by Tom Humphries and Patrick Bolger — Running to Stand Still — which was published after the 2000 Olympics. Humphries observed: “When she talks about drugs in her workplace the anger doesn’t punch out from inside her chest. The rage isn’t there anymore. Can’t afford it. She needs the energy too much. She works in a world where the innocence has been pilfered and the greatest heroes are the biggest suspects. She just looks after her side of the street now.”

What she did instead was run on her record, the openness and transparency of her training regime, and on the reputation of her associates and trainers who were known in the business as squeaky-clean.

O’Sullivan suggested there was nothing she could do about the cheats as they were always one step ahead. But cheating is also about character, what pride really means to an individual, and how important their relationship with their country is.

O’Sullivan pointed out: “If I took drugs and I had a positive drugs test, I’d have to go and live on a desert island somewhere. I couldn’t live with it. So many athletes aren’t the focus of attention in their country. They get caught and other people take their place and nobody cares, but I’m running in Sydney and I can hear Irish people calling my name, see them waving the flags. People would never forgive me. I can’t imagine that attention, the reactions, what my father would say to me… everything that Ireland has given me. You can’t even think of it.”

Others with less character and courage, at home and abroad, could not only contemplate cheating, but could do it repeatedly, often while piously maintaining their innocence.

In her autobiography Life in the Fast Lane, Marion Jones declared: “I have always been unequivocal in my opinion: I am against performance-enhancing drugs. I have never taken them and I never will.”

Despite their focus, athletes like Sonia must have found themselves wondering about the might-have-beens and the lost medals, most obviously in her case the Olympic medal she was cheated out of at an early stage in her career, the 1992 games in Barcelona.

Here she finished in the most difficult position of all — fourth — only to discover the following summer that Tetyana Dorovskikh, the silver medallist from that 3,000 metre final, had tested positive for steroids.

The Chinese athletes trained by the infamous Ma Junren walked away from the Sydney Olympics when they heard that EPO testing would be compulsory.

Obviously, a clean athlete who witnesses the public exposure of cheats who ran against them will feel a certain vindication and a degree of satisfaction that the wrongdoing has been publicised, but for them it is not as simple as that.

Tarnished Olympic finals are not rerun and real amends can rarely be made.

Consider the women who ran against Marion Jones at the Sydney Olympics. One of them, the Jamaican sprinter Tanya Lawrence, was interviewed last weekend by Ewan MacKenna for the Sunday Tribune, and she said: “I could come out and say I want that medal… but when I crossed that line I was third, I was third on the podium, and I wouldn’t feel like I worked for it. That may sound weird, but I am not going to ask for hand-me-downs, and that’s what it would feel like. The only thing I am left wondering about is the direction my career might have taken. It could have become much bigger.”

AND to further complicate matters, Katerina Thanou, the Greek athlete who won the silver medal in that race, is now shamelessly claiming the gold medal should be hers, even though she had been suspended in 2004 for missing a drugs test at the Athens Olympics.

This, of course, is a big year for athletics with the Beijing Olympics at the end of the summer. Can athletics fans really look forward to it?

Perhaps the humiliation of Marion Jones and the fact that she is facing bankruptcy may serve as a lesson and deter some potential drugs cheats.

But perhaps for some former athletics fans, too much damage has been done to the sport in the last two decades for it to be taken as seriously as it once was, which is a pity, but it is difficult to blame them.

This year, after all, marks the 20th anniversary of the Seoul Olympics when Ben Johnson ran 9.79 seconds to win the 100 metres and then tested positive for steroids.

Despite all this, we should not forget that for all those with the character of Marion Jones, there are also athletes who continue to share the ideals, the courage and the decency of Sonia O’Sullivan, and with characters of that calibre it is still possible to renew one’s faith in the sport and look forward to Irish athletes not necessarily winning many medals this year, but representing their country with honour.