LOS ANGELES, 15 May 2004 — Sprint queen Marion Jones, dogged by insinuations linking her to BALCO lab founder Victor Conte, Thursday denied that she received performance enhancing drugs from Conte, who is facing charges of distributing steroids to athletes.
“I have never accepted, nor taken, nor have been offered any performance enhancing drug by anyone,” Jones said on a teleconference to promote her appearance at the Home Depot Invitational athletics meeting on May 22 in Carson, California.
Jones, who captured five medals at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, was among 27 athletes named in a federal investigator’s memo as having received the synthetic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) from BALCO, according to a report published in the San Jose Mercury News.
The newspaper — which also named baseball superstar Barry Bonds — reported that the document is a summation of Internal Revenue Service agent Jeff Novitzky’s interview of BALCO president Victor Conte from Sept. 3, 2004, and that Conte volunteered the names.
Lawyers for Conte, who was indicted along with three other men in the case, have denied he named athletes who received drugs. Jones was among many high-profile competitors in several sports who testified before a grand jury investigating BALCO.
Documents from the case have been turned over to the Senate Commerce Committee and could in theory be used by the US Anti-Doping Agency to ban athletes from the 2004 Olympic team if they provide hard evidence of doping — even in the absence of a positive test result. Jones has insisted that her name will be cleared as more information in the BALCO case comes out. But as she prepares for another multiple medal attempt at the Athens Games, Jones said she did not plan to put herself out to prove she’s clean.
