Sideline Cut:As the Beijing Olympics loom on the horizon, much of the fireworks and goodwill and wonder that characterised the Sydney Games seven years ago has been reduced to the sober duty list of a New York City courthouse.

Some time yesterday afternoon, the irredeemably tainted Marion Jones was expected to appear and lend her own voice to the loudest whisper in world athletics. Her confession that she had, after all, taken performing-enhancing pharmaceuticals and lied about it to federal agents will not only see her stripped of the five Olympic medals she won on the bright nights in Australia but almost certainly see her serve a jail term and leave her with nothing but infamy from a lifetime spent on the sprint track.

It is probable that desperation - a sense of the hounds closing in - prompted Jones to write a letter of apology to her family and friends. She may have taken stock of the fact that with her athletics career effectively over, she faced the choice between, on the one hand, living out her life in the shadow of messy and unsubstantiated rumour and, on the other hand, wiping the slate clean, making official the disgrace and hoping for some redemption and forgiveness in the coming years.

Jones, after all, is - or rather was - a persuasive television performer. And had fate or luck spun in a different direction, she could have expected a lucrative post-athletic career as a sports anchor with a major network. Perhaps, when the hard time has been done, there will be book deals and chat-show appearances and a message of caution for the future stars of track and field.

Perhaps Jones realised that if she couldn't be the ultimate star, she had best settle for being the ultimate fallen star. If you are going to end up as a moral parable, better to have a voice in it.

For the journey to yesterday's confession has been swift and dazzling. It does not seem that long ago since Jones was the name around which the Sydney Olympics revolved. Ten years after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson shattered all notions of the Olympics as somehow Corinthian and innocent world athletics still needed a hard sell. In that time only Michael Johnson had become a household name.

In the approach to the Sydney Games, though, Jones's marketability and "drive for five" (gold medals) gave the big television companies a neat tagline. She made sprinting seem effortless; she smiled for the cameras and she was bright.

In 1998, Jones earned an unprecedented $753,000 from appearances and endorsements. A summer later her name went global as she chased the $1-million Golden League jackpot in meetings around Europe. The mood of those tournaments was darkened after Merlene Ottey, the popular Jamaican sprinter, tested positive for nandrolone. In August of 1999, Michael Johnson made a rare appearance alongside Jones and the sprint phenomenon Maurice Greene at a Seville press conference designed to put a positive gloss on the image of world athletics. Jones spoke well and then went out and tore up the field in the 100 metres, leaving Inge Miller and Ekaterini Thanou in her wake.

As the world went Oz-daft in the autumn of 2000, Sydney was Marion Jones's stage. On the balmy nights out in Homebush, she did not disappoint, taking three gold and two silver medals. But even those glittering weeks were troubled. Her husband, the hulking, scowling shot-put champion CJ Hunter, had tested positive four times for substance abuse. Jones gave a hasty press conference, defending her man but distancing herself from his actions.

For us journalists in that room, watching Jones play dumb to the contents of the big guy's medical cabinet was an uncomfortable experience. And of course the dots were connected. It did not go unnoticed that Johnnie Cochrane, the man who had defended OJ Simpson, was in the room. Old reports resurfaced of how Cochrane had defended Jones way back in 1991, when she was just a kid on the rise and missed an out-of-competition drug test.

But on the track, Jones moved like dropped mercury and the Australian crowd were so warm and appreciative that those races looked magical and people willed them to be true.

At best, Jones had a year to enjoy her status as the first lady of world athletics. After Sydney, the decline was breathtaking. In Edmonton in 2001, the unimaginable happened: Jones was beaten in a sprint. The new world champion was a 28-year-old Ukrainian, Zhanna Pintusevich-Block.

By now, Jones and Hunter had parted company. A year later, she and her new partner, sprinter Tim Montgomery, were forced to acquiesce to sponsors' pressure and cut all links with Charlie Francis, the man who had coached poor Ben Johnson.

In 2003, Jones and Montgomery had a child together. By 2004, she was struggling to make an impression at the USA Olympic trials and caught the flight only after making the grade in the long jump and sprint relay.

Marion still smiled for the cameras in Athens but looked strained and haunted. At the other end of the world, CJ Hunter was telling pressmen he had watched his ex-wife inject herself with tetrahydrogestrinone, a foolproof concoction known as "The Clear". And Marion's name was being mentioned in connection with Balco, a San Francisco pharmaceutical company whose clients included the biggest names in US sport.

Marion finished fifth in the long jump, and in the relay she was involved in a ruinous baton exchange.

In the pit of the stadium that sweltering night, the tears came as she stood before the cameras and inquisitors, already on trial. For the first time she looked beaten.

Since then, the allegations have intensified. She and Montgomery parted company. She tested positive for an illegal substance last year but was cleared when the second sample proved negative.

It hardly mattered. By February of this year, the Euro meetings committee, who run the summer track nights, had moved to ban her, the way a drunk gets barred from a pub.

This year she married the Barbados sprinter Obadele Thompson and they are expecting a child.

That fast decade looks hollow now. In newspaper columns and talk shows all over the world, her reputation will be burned at the stake in the usual self-righteous rants. There will be anger, real and otherwise, at being asked to cheer what was an illusion, a confidence trick.

But surely the point about Marion Jones is that here was a smart, educated, driven and rare athlete who had more natural talent than most yet ultimately could not trust her own ability.

Why was that? She got lost in a sporting culture where the rules had become hopelessly insufficient to monitor the human weakness and impulse to win, to be the best, to be first, a desire that governs the solitary pursuit of athletics like few other sports.

Jones, basking in another shimmering 100-metre victory, was once asked about beating the untouchable records set by the late Florence Griffith-Joyner in the 1980s.

"In 50 years' time when my grandchildren ask me how I done, I'll be able to tell them that I won," she said with bright defiance. "And that's what all Americans understand."

That was in Seville some eight summers ago. The world lay at her feet, plain and winnable as a synthetic sprint track.