Ron C. Judd / Times staff columnist
Notebook: Track trials prove little about athletes' use

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New field event at the U.S. Olympic track-and-field trials in Sacramento: the Brazen Spin. And a lot of people are proving really good at it.

Evidence: Some of the nation's sports media this past week were saying the doping scandal that has plagued track and field was as much as over.

The reasoning? Most of the athletes implicated directly in the BALCO designer-steroid scandal flopped so badly they're off the squad. And the one big name implicated less directly — Marion Jones — qualified in the long jump, an occurrence that has been deemed by many to be "good for the sport" at a difficult time.

Pause for extended throat-clearing. Are they serious?

Even as BALCO-implicated athletes were dropping like flies, an athlete already on the team — sprinter Torri Edwards — was revealed to have tested positive for yet another banned stimulant, nikethamide. (Her ingenious defense: yet another accidental ingestion.) By the end of week, two teammates at her track club joined her on the for-shame list.

Edwards' case goes before a U.S. arbitration panel in Orange County, Calif., tomorrow. If she remains on the U.S. squad along with Jones, the red, white and blue team will be tainted in the eyes of the rest of the world. Count on it.

That's probably not fair: Most of them — well, surely some of them — aren't cheaters. It's true that at this point, Jones is guilty primarily by association. Emphasis on "at this point."

She has never failed a drug test, according to the mantra being offered up by Jones and her handlers. That's the truth. Well, half of it at least. The rest: The doping substance in question, THG, which Jones' entire inner circle is being investigated for using or distributing, could not be detected in tests until this year.

It's a crucial point. An athlete could have been oozing THG out of every bodily opening at, say, the Sydney Games, and still wouldn't have tested positive for the stuff because it was unknown. That's the most frightening specter of the BALCO scandal: It has proven how readily and easily athletes can cheat and not get caught, by staying one step ahead of tests.

The question, then: Did Jones use?
 
Who knows? All that's certain is that her inner circle is neck-deep in BALCO slime, and her partner, Tim Montgomery, admitted the entire illegal doping scheme to a federal grand jury in great detail.

And this: As the investigation drags along, Jones' high-profile P.R. team has managed to make the woman come across as — cue the string section — a victim.

Spare us. If Jones is a victim of anything, it's her own stupidity.

The lesson of Jones is not one of an innocent person getting unfairly dragged into other people's dirty business. It is one of a person repeatedly jumping headlong into it and rolling around, like a wildebeest in a mudhole on a hot day — then later becoming indignant when people make note of the dirt.

She's probably never failed an IQ test, either. But are they asking the right questions?

Not that our fair Marion can't serve as an example. We offer here a couple tips for future high-profile, multiple-gold medalists with millions of endorsement dollars on the line:

1) If your boyfriend should suddenly put on a little weight — say, oh, 28 pounds — and he hasn't been spending mornings at Winchell's, look him in the eye and ask him about his choice of "nutritional supplements."

2) If you ever see your husband, boyfriend, trainer, teammates or other close associates shooting up a strange substance with a syringe in the locker room, then leaping over tall buildings on the way home, don't look the other way, don't defend them, and don't lie to save their skins. Turn them in.

3) Should you fail to exercise the common sense God gave a goat and neglect to observe the advice in tips one and two, don't expect a lot of sympathy from the rest of goatkind.

Blood suckers

While all this silliness was unfolding in Sacramento, swimmer Gary Hall Jr. was outlining to us his own simple anti-doping plan. The more we look at it, the more it makes sense. To wit:

• Take a few tubes of blood from every major athlete. Test it for all known banned substances. Keep it on file in perpetuity.

• When new substances are discovered, re-test the old samples. If a positive results, any records, championships, rankings, prize money and, yes, Olympic medals get stripped.

"That's something I would gladly sign onto right now," he said. "I would go to jail if I was to test positive for a steroid."

He'd also give back his eight Olympic medals, whether the International Olympic Committee asked or not, he vowed.

"You don't have many athletes that will openly say that," he said. "You've definitely never heard Marion Jones offer that one."

Housing update

Megan Quann, Sydney gold medalist, is really not homeless. She wants everyone to know that, especially after we implied last week that she had sold her house in Tacoma and was so confident of making the Athens swim team that she had nowhere to stay until September.

She truly was confident, but she did have other arrangements, so don't be saving any space for her in a shelter.

Quann, 20, was in good spirits at the end of the Olympic trials in Long Beach late last week, in spite of having failed to qualify to defend her gold medal in the breaststroke.

What's next for Quann, of Puyallup? She's not entirely sure, she says. She'll wait to hear about entrance to the World Championships in Indianapolis this fall. She's game for it, but the event is largely controlled by sponsor Speedo, which has a couple other hot breaststrokers on its roster at the moment.

If she gets in, she'll go back to training. If not, she's not sure what she'll do.

"I haven't had more than a couple weeks off since I was, like, 11," she said.

She's not worried. She has a wedding to plan, PLU to attend in the fall and plenty of time to decide her swimming future.

One thing of which Quann is certain. When she gets married in December to high-school beau Nathan Jendrick, she'll take his last name.

It's less of a social statement than simple self-defense: Turns out Megan has been mistakenly introduced, at public appearances around the globe, as Michelle Kwan, the ice-skating queen with a similar name.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com.