Marion Jones has to kiss goodbye to Olympic medals

Published on Tuesday 8 December 2009 22:37

MARION Jones' Sydney Olympic individual sprint and long jump medals will be reallocated this week but her 100m gold will not be given to Greece's Katerina Thanou due to her own involvement in doping.

A senior International Olympic Committee source said yesterday that its executive board, meeting today and tomorrow, would upgrade athletes in the 100m and 200m sprints as well as the long jump, in which Jones won bronze, but would not reallocate her 100m gold medal.

American Jones was stripped in 2007 of her 100, 200 and 4x400 gold and long jump and 4x100 bronze Sydney Olympic medals for using banned drugs. She served a jail sentence for lying to federal prosecutors about her steroid use.

An appeal by Jones's relay team-mates, who were also stripped of their medals because of her doping, is still pending at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and no decision will be taken about those medals.

Pauline Davis-Thompson of the Bahamas, who won the 200m silver in Sydney, will be upgraded to gold and Russian Tatyana Kotova will be given the long jump bronze medal.

But Jones' 100m gold medal will not be given to Thanou, who won silver but four years later missed a doping test on the eve of the Athens Olympics and said she had been involved in a motorcycle crash.

Thanou was banned from competing in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing for bringing her sport into disrepute in Athens.

Meanwhile, Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell says he can catch countryman and world's fastest man Usain Bolt when the two face off next year.

"Usain is the target right now and I'm shooting at him," Powell said yesterday in Singapore while promoting next year's Youth Olympic Games. "I know that I can do it."

Powell, who has run a personal best of 9.72 seconds in the 100m, will square off against Bolt and American Tyson Gay in the IAAF Diamond League, a new circuit for the top-tier of track and field starting in 2010, a year with no Olympics or World Championships on the schedule.

Bolt, the 100m and 200m world record holder and a three-time Olympic champion, ran a record 9.58 seconds at Berlin in August, a mark that Powell believes he can be beat.

"I knew 9.5 was possible," he said. "I'm not sure if 9.4 is possible, but I'm 100 per cent sure that you'll see some very fast times next year."