Locker Room:  In America in the summer of 2000 Marion Jones was everywhere. Selling things to us, things like milk and sneakers and Mom's apple pie. Selling herself and her looks and her impish charm. Selling the Drive for Five. Saving athletics. Selling athletics. Asking us to reconsider the boundaries of athletic possibility. She had a smile that threatened to make defibrillators redundant and a style that was all Hollywood.

We know now that she was playing the long con. We were her marks. We viewed her as a great athlete but she belongs in a different pantheon altogether, with Charles Ponzi and his pyramid scheme, with Victor Lustig, who sold the Eiffel Tower, with Frank Abagnale the great forger. Marion is one of the great con artists, a grifter, a hustler, an operator par excellence.

On Friday Marion got six months in jail. She'll be okay. I don't know if we'll ever recover though, and athletics won't heal for a long , long time.

Marion Jones isn't worth our worry, though. She's got the big brass cojones to parlay disgrace into another fortune and she will.

Think of it. If you wanted a high-wire act that would thieve your breath, the Drive for Five was it. This slip of a girl, a basketball champ, a gorgeous, media-savvy charmer, announcing that she was going to Sydney to win five gold medals. The romance of it drew us in whether we wanted to be drawn in or not.

The audacity! The chutzpah! Five golds! Just watch me, everyone!

That summer she was the greatest show on earth. I watched her at the US Olympic trials in balmy Sacramento and she commanded the stage effortlessly. Her personality made believers out of men and women who had been agnostic since Ben Johnson. We gathered around her feet like straggling pigeons hopeful of crumbs - a quote, a smile, a wave. Marion! Marion!

What guts! Setting herself up for the pot-shots. Putting her head above the ledge. Daring to fail. Daring to dream. The con artist sells nothing more substantial at the end of the day than hopes and dreams. We wanted a hero. Marion Jones saw our need.

And we know now that she was cheating all the time. If you love sport and believe in its ennobling possibilities that's disappointing in a hideous, visceral way, but if you are fascinated by grifters and bunco artists it is amazing. Every other cheat looks like a second-rate flim-flam man by comparison.

The gal cheated her way to millions of dollars with the cool of a card counter in a second-rate casino. Her athletics baubles and records have been taken away but in the pantheon of tricksters and snake-oil salespeople she stands alone.

You would have thought the title of Linford Christie's autobiography - To Be Honest With You - was the most startlingly hilarious juxtaposing of literature and athletics till you opened up Life In The Fast Lane by Marion Jones, with its 23-word declaration on page 173 of her "view" on drugs.

"I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN UNEQUIVOCAL IN MY OPINION: I AM AGAINST PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS. I HAVE NEVER TAKEN THEM. AND I NEVER WILL."

These words in bold red lettering were all that appeared on Page 173. They were just the reassurance any believer needed.

I mean you had to have your guilty, furtive little doubts given that she had missed a test in 1992 when she was just a kid and hired no less a legal heavyweight than Johnny Cochrane to beat the rap on that one.

But hey, she was a kid back then and brimful of talent. Maybe it was all a mistake with the missed tests. Why lose a year or two of your career over something silly? Anyway, look at her batting away questions about drugs. She hates the things.

Unequivocal. Big red lettering. Twenty-three words. To one page.

Even in Sydney, with the Drive for Five falling apart, we piled into a theatre and watched her shrug in absolute bewilderment and sorrow at the news that her husband, CJ Hunter, had thrown up a whole slew of positive tests that summer. Why it was counter to everything Marion stood for and believed in. CJ, the big old drugged-up oaf, was cut loose.

Really, this girl had ice in her blood along with EPO and human growth hormone.

When the Balco story broke a few years ago, Marion announced she was suing one of the central characters, one Victor Conte, for no less than $25 million. She was a woman in her prime; she would not be besmirched or tainted, thanks very much.

She tested positive in 2006. If you knew what she - having gotten away with 170 or so other tests - knew about herself, that can hardly have been a surprise, but she fronted it out, came out swinging, threatening to bring down the whole house with legal actions if this didn't come right. Hey presto, the B sample for some reason didn't agree with the A sample. She walked.

So cool was she under pressure that you began to doubt your own capacity to doubt her. Would anybody really have the gall to summon so many learned friends and so much righteous indignation as part of a bluff, as just another act in the long con? Surely not.

Imagine all the times she sat with testers wondering if the beaker she had just filled for them would betray her and turn up the wrong figures. Yet she took the tests and went back out to be in the world again, sucking in the tension, acting righteous.

In the end she confessed to only what she had to confess to. She did what was expedient. There were no more escape routes. Like the true grifter she turned a disaster into a rescue operation.

Prosecutors in recent weeks brought considerable evidence that Marion Jones's doping escapades were of far greater duration and penetration than anything she was admitting to in court, but having struck a deal to diminish the impact of charges of obstructing the way of truth, she got away with six months' jail and 800 hours' community service. In the dock she was magnificent, appealing for every ounce of mercy a judge might be able to summon. The word went out that she was penniless, a mother of two young children, as much a victim in this as the rest of us.

She'll do whatever fraction of her six-month sentence the law requires and get down to the book deal with, one presumes, a revised page 173. There will be movie rights and there will be Oprah to talk to and weep with. There will be Jesus to find and redemption to seek and Elmer Gantry to become. And her sport, the vehicle for her grift? Beijing will be an empty pantomime beset by ghosts and phantoms. We will believe nothing. We will know that in the great five-ringed circus half of what we see is the work of three-card-trick merchants.

We won't be able to tell the innocent from the guilty. And running - trying to be faster than the next person, the sport that should be purest and most instinctive - running will be dead for us.

What a legacy for one girl with a big ole smile and a little talent!