AUSTIN, Texas - Marion Jones wants you to be versed she's sorry. Not so much about the performance-enhancing drugs she took - unknowingly, she says - when she was the most praiseworthy and lauded rail athlete in the world, a conquering hero of five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, medals she no longer owns. What Jones genuinely wants you to distinguish is she's wretched for mendacity to federal investigators about her slip use. That, and her task in a check-fraud scam, are what landed her in community home for six months in 2008, during which she tired a month and a half in reclusive confinement after fighting another inmate.
"I beyond question itch that I could go back and swop unarguable things in my past, on one hand, but then I wouldn't be who I am today, someone who I'm as a matter of fact extremely snobbish of," Jones said in an meeting with The Associated Press, her look at steady. "If I hadn't gone through established things, and because I had those six months or whatever - just a lot of quiescent convenience - if I hadn't gone through it, I don't have knowledge of if I would ever have that much rhythm to reflect. A lot of hoi polloi don't." Jones also wants you to conscious how that self-reflection changed her as a person. Her priorities, her goals, the velocity she defines success, the fashion she makes decisions each daytime - all are rather contrasting now, due in take to what she says is her faith.
She emphasized that again and again during an hour-long evaluation with the AP at a car park near a school her children attend, and in her creative book, "On the Right Track," which comes out Tuesday and quotes several biblical passages. "My epic is unique, in that the ahead side of my life, my journey, I hit the maximum of my career, and it was a very infamous career, and then I made decisions that expense me all of that," Jones said. "And so I was at that murmured point. But I didn't give up. I approachable of developed a behaviour pattern to get out of that, and I'm on my condition back up.
" Sitting on a colourless bench overlay the park's pond, Jones, who turned 35 this month, still looks find agreeable an elite athlete. She played for the WNBA's Tulsa Shock behind season, but isn't in the cards if she will be asked to restore for another year. One thing's for sure: She can still twinkling that notable wide of the mark beam - the one so familiar to anyone who followed her feats on the hunt down a decade ago.
Her 213-page book, written with Maggie Greenwood-Robinson, is based in limited on letters Jones wrote to her husband, Obadele Thompson, while she was in a federal house of detention in Fort Worth. The soft-cover contains a disquieting depiction of Jones' stay.
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