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I Had Five Olympic Medals. Then I Went To Prison." — Marion Jones — Transcript

by The Holly Confess · 2,641 words · 436 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00Um
0:01I want to tell you something I have
0:03never fully said out loud, not in the
0:06courtroom,
0:07not in the press conference where I
0:09stood in front of cameras and read a
0:11statement that had been prepared by
0:13lawyers who understood what the moment
0:15required better than I did, not in the
0:18interviews that followed where every
0:20question was shaped by what the record
0:22already showed and every answer I gave
0:25was measured against a version of events
0:28that had already been decided before I
0:30opened my mouth. I want to tell you what
0:32it actually felt like
0:34from the inside, from the place where
0:38the decisions were made and the
0:39consequences were lived and the
0:41understanding of what I had done arrived
0:43not all at once but slowly in pieces
0:47across years that I would not wish
0:52on anyone who had not earned them. My
0:55name is Marion Jones. I won five medals
0:58at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
1:01Three of them were gold.
1:03I was called the fastest woman in the
1:05world. I was on the covers of magazines
1:10and in television commercials and at the
1:14center of a story that the sport of
1:18athletics had been waiting to tell for
1:21years. A black woman from Los Angeles
1:25who had survived a childhood that did
1:27not offer obvious routes to an Olympic
1:30podium and had found one anyway. The
1:33story wrote itself. The world celebrated
1:36it. I celebrated it and then I destroyed
1:40it. Not slowly, not through a series of
1:43small mistakes that
1:46um accumulated into something larger
1:48than I had intended. I made specific
1:53choices on specific days
1:57with the specific knowledge that what I
2:00was doing carried consequences I was
2:03choosing not to think about. And
2:07everything that followed, the
2:09investigations,
2:10the stripped metals, the guilty plea,
2:14the prison sentence was the consequence
2:18of those choices arriving in the order
2:21that consequences always arrive. At 49,
2:25I am finally ready to tell you exactly
2:28what happened.
2:30Not the version that the court documents
2:33contain. The version that lived inside
2:36the court documents,
2:38the one that only
2:40I have ever fully known. I grew up in
2:43Los Angeles in uh a household that
2:48understood hard work before it
2:50understood anything else. My mother
2:54worked. My stepfather worked. The
2:57message in our home was never
2:59complicated. You earn what you have and
3:01you protect what you earn and you do not
3:03look for shortcuts because shortcuts are
3:05where the trouble lives.
3:07I absorbed that message the way children
3:10absorb messages from parents they love
3:13and respect. Completely.
3:16Without examining it.
3:18As a framework for everything that
3:20followed. I discovered running the way
3:24some people discover it by being fast
3:27before I understood that fast was
3:30something the world would eventually
3:31care about. By the time I reached high
3:34school,
3:35the times I was running were attracting
3:38attention that felt less like
3:40recognition and more like obligation.
3:43Something was expected of me. Something
3:47specific. Something measurable.
3:51Something that would eventually require
3:54me to stand on a track in front of a
3:56crowd and perform at a level that the
4:00attention implied. Um
4:04I went to the University of North
4:05Carolina on a basketball scholarship
4:07before track and field pulled me back. I
4:10was good enough at basketball that the
4:12professional game was
4:14a realistic conversation, not a fantasy.
4:18But sprinting was something different.
4:21Sprinting was where I understood myself
4:24most completely. Where the gap between
4:28who I was in ordinary life and who I
4:32could be in competition felt smallest.
4:36Where
4:37the work I put in translated directly
4:40into results that I could control in a
4:42way that almost nothing else in life
4:44allows. I trained with a seriousness
4:48that the results eventually reflected.
4:52By the late 1990s, I was among the best
4:54female sprinters in the world. Not
4:57approaching the top at it. The 100
5:00meters, the 200 meters, the long jump,
5:04multiple events, multiple disciplines, a
5:08range that most athletes at that level
5:11had stopped attempting years earlier
5:14because the sports demands make
5:17specialization the rational choice. I
5:21refused the rational choice.
5:24I wanted everything the sport had to
5:26offer and I trained as though wanting it
5:30was sufficient to produce it. By the
5:33time Sydney arrived, I believed that was
5:36true. That the wanting and the work and
5:41the years of preparation had built
5:43something clean, something I had earned
5:47in the way my mother and stepfather had
5:50taught me things were supposed to be
5:52earned. I was wrong about that,
5:55but I did not know it yet. The Sydney
5:57Olympics in 2000 were the moment the
6:01story reached its public peak. Five
6:04medals.
6:06Three gold, one silver, one bronze
6:08across five events in 10 days.
6:12A performance that
6:14the athletics world responded to with
6:16the kind of attention that changes the
6:19relationship between an athlete and the
6:21public permanently.
6:23I was not just a champion in Sydney, I
6:26was the story of the games.
6:29The face on the front pages, the name
6:33in the conversations
6:35that happened in living rooms and
6:38offices and school classrooms in
6:41countries whose languages I did not
6:44speak. I stood on those podiums and felt
6:48something I want to describe accurately
6:52because accuracy is what this is about
6:55now.
6:56I felt proud,
6:58genuinely, completely, without
7:01reservation.
7:03The races had been real. The times had
7:06been real. The competition had been
7:09fierce,
7:11and the victories had been produced on a
7:13track in front of the world, and the
7:16medals were physical objects I could
7:19hold, and the feeling attached to them
7:21was not manufactured or conditional.
7:25What I was not thinking about in those
7:27moments, what I had trained myself
7:30with considerable deliberate effort not
7:34to think about was the substance. The
7:37decision had been made before Sydney.
7:40Not casually, not without awareness of
7:43what it meant. I had made a choice that
7:48existed in direct contradiction to
7:51everything my childhood had taught me
7:53about earning what you have.
7:56I had told myself the story that people
7:59in that position tell themselves that
8:02the substance was not what the rules
8:04said it was. That the medical
8:07explanation was legitimate. That the
8:09line between what was permitted and what
8:14was not was less clear than the rulebook
8:18suggested.
8:19And that I was operating in the
8:22ambiguous space between them rather than
8:25on the wrong side of a line that was in
8:27fact very clearly drawn. I knew the line
8:31was clearly drawn.
8:34I chose to stand on the wrong side of it
8:36and tell myself I was standing somewhere
8:38else. That is the thing I've spent the
8:41most time with across the years that
8:43followed Sydney.
8:45Not the legal consequences.
8:48Not the stripped medals or the returned
8:50prize money or the prison sentence. The
8:53specific moment of self-deception that
8:56made all of it possible.
8:59The decision to look directly at what I
9:01was doing and choose a version of it
9:04that allowed me to continue. The world
9:07did not find out immediately. That is
9:09one of the things that makes the story
9:12of what I did more complicated than the
9:15clean narrative of caught and punished
9:17that the public record suggests. I
9:20competed after Sydney.
9:22I continued winning. I continued being
9:25Marion Jones, the fastest woman in the
9:27world,
9:29the face of American track and field,
9:31the person whose name attached itself to
9:35the sport in a way that made me
9:37simultaneously its greatest asset and
9:41though I did not know it yet in those
9:43terms
9:44its most significant liability. The
9:47United States Anti-Doping Agency began
9:50investigating
9:52the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative
9:54BALCO became the center of a federal
9:57investigation that extended far beyond
10:00athletics and touched professional
10:03baseball and football and the entire
10:06landscape of American sport. And at the
10:10center of that investigation, connected
10:12by evidence that accumulated slowly and
10:15then all at once
10:17was my name. I denied it
10:20publicly, repeatedly
10:23with a conviction in my voice
10:25that I was producing not because I
10:27believed what I was saying, but because
10:29I had convinced myself that believing it
10:33was possible and that conviction was
10:35therefore available to me. I looked at
10:38cameras and told journalists that I had
10:41never used performance-enhancing
10:44substances
10:45and I said it with the composure of
10:48someone who had spent years learning how
10:51to occupy the center of public attention
10:54without revealing what was happening at
10:57the edges.
10:58The composure held
11:01longer than it should have.
11:03Longer than the evidence warranted. And
11:07in the gap between what the evidence was
11:10showing and what I was publicly saying I
11:14made another choice that the first
11:16choice had made inevitable. I lied to
11:19federal investigators
11:21not about the substances
11:24about financial transactions connected
11:29to a check fraud scheme involving my
11:32former coach and business associates.
11:35The lie to the investigators
11:38was the lie that the legal system was
11:41eventually able to prove, and it was the
11:44lie that produced the criminal charge,
11:47that produced the guilty plea, that
11:49produced the sentence. I stood in a
11:52federal courtroom in 2007
11:55and pleaded guilty to making false
11:57statements to federal agents. I read a
12:00statement acknowledging what I had done.
12:03I looked at the cameras one final time
12:06as Marion Jones, Olympic champion, and
12:10understood that the next time I appeared
12:12in public it would be as something the
12:14cameras would frame differently. Six
12:17months. That is the sentence I served
12:21at the Federal Medical Center Carswell
12:23in Fort Worth, Texas. Six months in a
12:26federal prison facility, separated from
12:28my children, separated from the life I
12:31had built, living inside the
12:33consequences
12:35of decisions I had made on specific days
12:38when I had understood exactly what I was
12:40choosing and had chosen it anyway. I
12:42want to be honest about what prison was
12:46because honesty is the only thing I have
12:48left that belongs entirely to me. It was
12:51not what the dramatic version of the
12:54story requires it to be. It was not
12:58violent or terrifying in the ways that
13:00prison is described by people who have
13:03not been inside one.
13:05It was something quieter and in some
13:08ways more difficult than the dramatic
13:10version. It was time. Extended,
13:13unstructured, unoccupied time in which
13:17the only thing available to think about
13:19was the sequence of decisions that had
13:21produced the room I was sitting in. I
13:24thought about my mother, about the
13:27household I had grown up in and the
13:29message it had carried and the distance
13:31between that message and the choices I
13:33had made.
13:35I thought about my children who were
13:37being raised for 6 months without me
13:40present because I had decided on
13:43specific days that certain things were
13:46more important than the consequences of
13:48those decisions arriving in the lives of
13:50people who had not made them. I
13:53I thought about the other athletes.
13:56The ones who had competed against me in
13:58Sydney and
14:00in the years that followed. The ones who
14:02had lost to me on days when the margin
14:05of victory had been produced by
14:07something other than what they were
14:09putting into their own preparation.
14:12The ones who had gone home with silver
14:13medals or no medals and had carried
14:16those results as part of their
14:18competitive record without knowing the
14:20full context of what they had been
14:22competing against. That was the part
14:25that stayed longest.
14:27Not my own loss, the medals were gone
14:29before the sentence was handed down.
14:32Stripped by the International Olympic
14:35Committee in 2007
14:38when I returned them along with the
14:41statement that I had used a prohibited
14:44substance before Sydney.
14:47My own loss I could process because it
14:50was mine to process.
14:52What I could not process with the same
14:55ease was what my choices had cost people
14:59who had never chosen anything except to
15:03compete cleanly and accept whatever
15:06result that produced. I came out of
15:10prison in September 2008.
15:13The Beijing Olympics were happening.
15:17The sport I had given 20 years of my
15:19life to was continuing without me as
15:22sports continue without every athlete
15:24who leaves them, because the sport is
15:26larger than any individual who has ever
15:29competed in it. I rebuilt,
15:33not quickly, not in the way that
15:35redemption narratives are sometimes
15:39constructed, where the lesson is learned
15:42and the character is reformed and the
15:44story resolves into something the
15:46audience can feel comfortable with,
15:49slowly, with the understanding that
15:51rebuilding after the specific kind of
15:53damage I had done to my own life,
15:56um, was not something that produced a
15:59clean ending. It produced a different
16:01life, one that carried the previous life
16:06inside it permanently. Um,
16:09I became involved in education. I worked
16:12with young athletes. I spoke in schools
16:16about choices and consequences in a way
16:20that I could not have spoken before the
16:22choices and the consequences had arrived
16:25in my own life with the specificity they
16:28arrived with. The credibility I had as
16:30someone who had been to the top of the
16:32sport and then to a federal prison
16:34facility was a different kind of
16:36credibility from the one I had carried
16:38as an Olympic champion, less glamorous,
16:41more useful. What I finally understood,
16:44and this is the thing I most want to say
16:46clearly, because it is the thing that
16:50took the longest to understand is that
16:52the destruction was never really about
16:55the substance or the investigation or
16:57the courtroom or the prison. Those were
17:00consequences.
17:02The destruction happened on the specific
17:04days when I made the specific choices
17:07that set all of it in motion. The
17:09destruction happened in private, in
17:12moments that no camera captured and no
17:15investigator documented, when I decided
17:18that what I wanted was more important
17:21than what I knew was right. I'd been
17:24taught differently.
17:25I knew differently, and I chose
17:27differently anyway. At 49,
17:31I am not asking for the understanding
17:34that I did not earn. I am not
17:37constructing a version of the story that
17:40distributes the responsibility
17:43across a system or a culture or a set of
17:47pressures that made the choices feel
17:50inevitable.
17:52They were not inevitable.
17:54They were mine. Five Olympic medals, a
17:58federal prison sentence, a rebuilt life
18:01that carries both of those things
18:03permanently and has learned
18:05across years that required the learning
18:10to be honest about what each of them
18:12actually cost. I destroyed my own life.
18:16And I did it with full knowledge of what
18:19I was doing. That is the truth I finally
18:22admitted
18:23to myself first,
18:25then to everyone else.
18:27The medals that were mine for 7 years
18:31are in the possession of the
18:33International Olympic Committee. The
18:35women who finished behind me in Sydney
18:38have had their results corrected in the
18:40record books. The sport moved forward
18:43the way sports move forward with the
18:46next generation of athletes, the next
18:48set of records, the next story to tell.
18:52I move forward, too.
18:54Not back to what I was,
18:56forward to something different.
18:58Something that does not carry the weight
19:00of performance, but carries a different
19:03weight entirely.
19:05The weight of having lived through the
19:07full consequence of choices I made when
19:09I I young enough to believe that
19:11consequences were something that
19:13happened to other people. They are not.
19:16They happen to everyone. They happen to
19:18me. And at 49, the most honest thing I
19:23can tell you is that I am grateful for
19:26that. Not for the prison or the stripped
19:29medals or the years of rebuilding, for
19:32the understanding,
19:34for the specific
19:36hard-won knowledge that what you do when
19:40nobody is watching is the most important
19:42thing you ever do. Um I had five Olympic
19:46medals.
19:47Then I went to prison. And somewhere
19:50between those two facts lies the story
19:53of every choice I made in between. I
19:56finally told it

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