When Marion Jones draped the Belizean flag around her shoulders after winning the 100 meters at the 2000 Olympiad, she became our hero. Before this, Ludwig Lightburn was no. 1. He was our brightest star athlete on the international stage of boxing, though he never won a world championship. Marion superceded him when she earned the title of the world’s fastest woman.
We all have to have heroes, real flesh and blood or fiction created by great writers. They are like gods to the faithless and, to the majority of us, their triumphs give glory to Our Father in heaven, and they bring us great joy.
Marion is an American, but we have adopted her as a daughter of Belize because she acknowledged her Belizeanhood before hundreds of millions all over the world. Her roots are Belizean. She is the niece of Senator Godwin Hulse, who also has become a hero to thousands of Belizeans, for his political battles in their cause.
You will note that I said “hero” (not heroine), because that is how I think of her.
I watched Marion on television while she made her public confession that she took steroids while preparing for the Olympics in Sydney, Australia. That is what the American public, especially their antidoping agency, wanted to hear. That is what they insisted upon in their quest for sports purity before the world – a worthy objective but unattainable, where the use of what is called “performance enhancing drugs” is concerned. What the agency hopes to do is to prevent American professional athletes from using these substances, so that they are never tested positive like Ben Johnson, the Chinese swimmers, and the East German weightlifters and women track athletes. No American, except C. J. Hunter, ever tested positive for drugs at an international event. He tested positive for ephedrine, which C. J. said he took as a cold remedy.
The U.S. Antidoping Agency hopes to prevent American professional athletes from using performance enhancing drugs, while the rest of the world leave it to the international sports governing bodies to conduct their tests to discover which participant is breaking the rules.
Marion made a mistake when she engaged Trevor Graham as her coach but, it is a mistake that any track athlete might have made because, they are all looking for an advantage and, Graham was supposed to be the best.
There is a special relationship between an athlete and her coach, especially if the athlete is very gifted and driven to excel. She has to have full confidence in him if they are to exceed. She has to take his advice and follow the training regimen devised, faithfully. Does this mean that she should have taken whatever he gave her to drink or apply to her body, without question? No. I would have expected her to act according to the dictates of prudence and good sense.
Now, I hear talk about taking away the medals Marion Jones won in the Olympics. She did so under the rules of engagement specified by the governing body of those Olympic Games. If the medals are taken away, to whom will they be given? The contestant who came in second? How will the governing body know for sure that her performance was not chemically aided, since the tests administered are apparently not efficient or sufficient. Will she be asked to swear, on pain of punishment if she were forsworn, to say whether she took performance enhancing drugs before the Olympics? (Ed. NOTE: According to the columnist Philip Hersh in the Saturday, October 6, 2007 issue of the Chicago Tribune, Greece’s Ekaterina Thanou, who finished second to Marion in the Sydney 100 meters, is “a suspected doper banned from the 2004 Olympics and given a two-year suspension for repeatedly lying about her whereabouts to drug testers.”)
What the USADA is doing is introducing new rules of engagement after the fact. According to the rules of engagement at the time of the Olympics, the performance of a participant was valid if she tested negative for banned substances after each event. According to those rules, her performance was valid, no matter what she is persuaded or compelled to say afterwards.
There is a constant battle being waged between the governing bodies of professional sports, who wish to ensure a fair playing field for the participants of the events they organize and, those who are engaged in discovering more effective substances to improve athletic performance, having little regard to whether or not these substances will be admissible by the governing bodies; but, having regard to whether the user can avoid detection by drug testing. This is perfectly normal in a free enterprise capitalist system where success is more important than scruples.
It was the patron saint of American professional sports, Green Bay Packer head coach Vince Lombardi, who is credited with saying, “Winning is not only everything; it is the only thing.” The professional attitude in America is, therefore, not imbued with the ideals of sportsmanship and fairplay. If we want a nation to have these high ideals, then, the children have to be taught that, “It does not matter as much whether they win or lose but, how they play the game.”
The people of Belize love Marion Jones. She shared with them her triumph in Australia and she showed her love for them by her personal contributions to the developing of sports in the land of her forebears. We love her for her God-given talents and generous spirit.