University removes Jones pictures from Hall of Honor
Updated: 2008-01-12 16:28
SALVO, North Carolina - The photographs of Marion Jones's once-glorious triumphs at the Sydney Olympics no longer hang in the University of North Carolina's Track and Field Hall of Honor.
"We did not think it was right to have those photos up," UNC athletic department spokesman Steve Kirschner told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Jones, sentenced to six months in prison on Friday for lying to federal investigators about her steroid use as a professional athlete, starred for the university's women's basketball and track and field teams in the mid 1990s.
Her basketball jersey will continue to hang in honor from the rafters of the women's basketball arena where she helped the school win the 1994 national collegiate championship as a talented point guard. Her school track and field records will also remain, Kirschner said.
"We did not feel there was any reason to take down something she had earned fairly while she was competing here," Kirschner said, adding "but what she did in the 2000 Olympics has been stricken, and it should be."
The removal came after the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) annulled all of Jones's results after September 1, 2000 and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stripped her of the five medals, including three gold, that Jones won at the Sydney Games.
Her sentencing on Friday was greeted with sadness and disappointment in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina where Jones, now a resident of Austin, Texas, trained during her highlight years.
"It not only hurts me, but it hurts the world," George Williams, the 2004 U.S. men's Olympic track and field coach, and coach and athletic director at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, told Reuters. "And it has put a damper on the area.
"Marion Jones was an outstanding young lady before all this (doping) happened," Williams said in a telephone interview on Friday from Nashville, Tennessee.
"Track and field has been hurt, this set us back. I know she has hurt herself, but this really hurt young women in track and young girls trying to come up in the sport."
Dennis Craddock, who coached Jones at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he would continue to love Jones.
"I'm just sorry these things happened to her after she got out of college," Craddock told Reuters, speaking from his Chapel Hill office. "She was a role model and hero to so many young people.
"But we all have choices to make in dealing with everything, and she just made some bad decisions."
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