Marion Jones Is Stripped of Olympic Medals

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The IOC formally stripped Marion Jones of her five Olympic medals today, wiping her name from the record books following her admission that she was a drug cheat.The International Olympic Committee also banned the disgraced American athlete from attending next year’s Beijing Olympics in any capacity and said it could bar her from future games.Ms. Jones had already handed back the three gold medals and two bronze she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations erased all of Ms. Jones’s results dating to September 2000, but it was up to the IOC to formally disqualify her and take away her Olympic medals.“She is disqualified and scrapped from the results,” the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, said at the close of a three-day executive board meeting.“It was an easy decision,” added an IOC vice president, Thomas Bach, a German lawyer who headed a three-member disciplinary panel in the case. “The facts were clear.”Ms. Jones won gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and 1,600-meter relay in Sydney, and bronze in the long jump and 100-meter relay. She was the first female track and field athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics.After long denying she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs, Ms. Jones admitted in federal court in October that she started using steroids before the Sydney Games. She said she’d used the designer steroid “the clear” from September 2000 to July 2001.In addition to stripping her Sydney medals, the IOC disqualified Ms. Jones from her fifth-place finish in the long jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics.The IOC postponed a decision on redistributing her medals, including whether to strip her eight American relay teammates and whether to upgrade a doping-tainted Greek sprinter, Katerina Thanou, to gold in the 100.Mr. Rogge said the IOC had initiated the process for removing the relay teams’ medals, but would give the runners a chance to state their case at a hearing. He said the athletes would be represented by the U.S. Olympic Committee, even though the body has already said the relays were tainted and the medals should be returned.Mr. Rogge said he expects the relay medal issue to be resolved at the next executive board meeting in Beijing in April.“Should the IOC decide to disqualify the teams, it would be a consequence of the doping offense of Ms. Jones and not the consequence of any faults committed by other members,” Mr. Rogge said.The American 1,600-relay team included Jearl-Miles Clark, Monique Hennagan, LaTasha Colander-Richardson, and Andrea Anderson. Chryste Gaines, Torri Edwards, Nanceen Perry, and Passion Richardson were on the 400-relay squad.

Marion Jones Is Stripped of Olympic Medals

Marion Jones Is Stripped of Olympic Medals

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