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It's a conundrum to be sure, we have testimony from her trainer and corroborating evidence in the form of her training calendar that yes, Marion Jones has used performance enhancing drugs. These drugs are not only available in the U.S. though, and apparently at the olympics in almost every sport there is universal use of illegal/banned substances. So in a sense it's a level playing field of doped atheletes across the board. Jone's trainer said that if they started taking away medals and reseting world records that you'd have to go back 20+ years. There's no way to know now which (if any) medals and records were earned by clean atheletes.
I think everyone can agree that there needs to be more stringent drug testing that starts well before the start of competition (Jones and others are able to stop taking the drugs allowing all traces to disappear from their system before the test). So the only way to catch doped atheletes would be to require them being tested monthly for 18-24 months prior to competition. The problem w/r/t the Olympics however is that this would be a logistical nightmare in application. Imagine requiring every member of "country X's" water polo team to be tested this frequently.
So the alternatives seem to be to penalize countries that can afford stringent drug testing or stick with the status quo--"may the best drugs win." Anyone else got ideas about this?
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