Question lingers: Is it safe to believe Jones?

ATHENS, Greece - Forget about the long jump. This is a giant leap of faith.

These are three innocent sprinters, sharing a baton and their medal hopes with Marion Jones, knowing she could take them all down with one horrific lie.

This is track coach Sue Humphrey, who announced Wednesday night that Jones will run the 4x100-meter relay, feeling very much like former Boston Red Sox manager Grady Little, damned if she pulls her star athlete and damned if she doesn't.

This is where the 2004 Olympiad, to date a generally pleasant experience for Team USA, could get permanently ugly.

``If she's innocent, she comes here and that's fine,'' World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Dick Pound said. ``If she's not, and she comes here and has made all those statements, it's going to be a dark and deep hole into which she goes. It would be a shame.''

If you have trouble viewing Barry Bonds as a clean athlete, then you probably wish Marion Jones had skipped the Olympics entirely. The mountain of doubt about Jones using banned substances has grown so high that Pound had no trouble referring to her by name during his blistering indictment of U.S. Track and Field.

Jones finally hit the track Wednesday, qualifying for the long jump finals without much trouble. No surprises there.

The real drama begins Thursday, when Jones will participate in the 4x100, where the potential consequences are steep.

If Jones wins a medal and is eventually cleared by investigators, this will become a wonderful story of perseverance. She will morph into the fighter that wouldn't go down quietly, the one convicted without a crime, scorned simply for the company she kept.

Yet if found guilty of using banned substances - and the results may not be in until January - she could force the entire team to give back its medals.

That happens, and Jones would be the worst liar and cheater imaginable, one who couldn't care less if she brought a few teammates down with her.

``It's all about coming out and doing your best in a hell of year,'' a smiling, bubbly Jones said Wednesday. ``You can take that any way you want. It's about coming out and doing your best in the midst of vast chaos.''

The plot thickened earlier in the day when former superstar Michael Johnson urged Team USA to keep Jones off the relay. Johnson was part of the 4x400 relay team that won gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and now he may be asked to give his own medal back. Turns out a member of that team, Jerome Young, tested positive for a banned substance before those Games.

The Jones outcry wouldn't be so loud if the circumstantial evidence weren't so damning. Jones was once married to C.J. Hunter, a shot putter who tested positive for steroids in Sydney and is now banned for life. Hunter claimed he not only watched Jones inject banned substances but that he occasionally did the injecting himself.

Jones, who defiantly proclaimed her innocence in a pre-Olympic news conference, chalked this up to a lying, vengeful ex-husband.

Jones' current boyfriend is sprinter Tim Montgomery, also the father of her child. Montgomery has also been charged with steroid use, and while he's not yet been banned, he failed to qualify in the 100 meters, an event in which he holds the world record.

Yet countering these suspicions is a certain American right, something about innocent until proven guilty. What if Jones is clean? What if she is telling the truth?

You want to believe in the former golden girl. She is still smiling, still fighting, just as she did in Sydney. But she looks different, a little jaded, a little tired. Just like the rest of us.

``I'm looking forward to my jump on Friday, then getting on a plane Saturday and going home to my little boy,'' Jones said. ``So things are a lot different than they were four years ago.''

In America, cynicism is an angry, overfed beast. It has been growing fat on athletes who betray our trust, the ones that lie, cheat and steal without the slightest moral hiccup.

Now Marion Jones is on the menu. She will not go down easy. This is something to be admired or something that will unleash fury down the road. And in the end, she may provide the answer to a question that's been building for years:

Is it safe to believe in an athlete ever again?

Question lingers: Is it safe to believe Jones?

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