UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In admitting to perjury before two grand juries during investigations into Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) steroid ring and a related check fraud ring, Marion Jones received a six-month sentence followed by a two-year probationary period. Consequently, these very same actions spurred another set of punitive mechanisms in which Jones was stripped of the five Olympic medals she won during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, for a so-called crime separate from perjury—that is, cheating in sport. Subject to two formal modes of punishment, Jones occupies a space of transgression that has marked her body as criminal—in fact, a felon— for overstepping the ethical boundaries of performance enhancement.