Locker Room: Four years ago this column had a happy working interlude covering the US Olympic trials in Sacramento. For all intents and purposes track and field hardly exists in the US outside of the muscular marketing arm of Nike and the quadrennial TV and flagwaving show that is the Olympics.

Sacramento was good though. We sunned ourselves till we were crispy. The crowds were big and boisterous. The cut-throat nature of the trials made the viewing compulsive. And there was decent close-up access to the skinny and the sweaty.

People came away talking chirpily about track and field having a future in the US. Which means a future on network television, which wasn't very likely. But still.

Of course there was a worm eating away at the heart of it all. Even then at the launch of Marion Jones's daring "drive for five" in Sydney the air we were breathing wasn't exactly pure. Around Sacramento the big, dirty throwers lumbered, and there was the man who claimed he'd had a positive as a result of too much beer and sex and there were the rumours and whispers. The air wasn't pure but we were used to that and we assumed American sport would just continue to be the fantasy land it had always been, turning out heroes with nice smiles and big muscles and heavy-duty lawyers.

Now four years on the trials are unfolding in Sacramento again. Much has changed on the track and off. There wasn't sufficient time for this column to get a working visa to cover the event and to do so on a holiday visa would be to risk a little time in chokey. Cheers. And the illusions are gone. All gone.

We don't know what the next few weeks hold for Marion Jones. It's hard, really, to care. Once, she seemed like the antidote to the cynicism which all but ended our interest in sprinters. She had the looks and the smile and the sense of derring-do. And when you found out that as a schoolgirl she once hired Johnny Cochran to help her escape a ban for missing tests, well you shrugged and said , maybe, maybe she's just a kid who made a mistake.

She had so much chutzpah, so much boiling energy, you just wanted to like her. An accomplished basketball player. A game long jumper. A lovely sprinter. Nike of course swaddled her and buffed her and sold her to us harder than she ever could. We liked her and we had to like her.

This week, she's competing again in Sacramento as a shrunken figure. She has either been hideously wronged or she is the most brazen, most astonishing cheat in history. Sadly, if the former transpires to be the case, well, you'd have to say she has been criminally careless with a reputation which was essential to the well-being of her sport.

She's 28 now and the smile has lost its kiddishness. It's four years since the Sydney Games, the point at which her life really began to change. Four years since we sat in a big room and listened to the details of how her husband, CJ Hunter, had toured Europe with his gut rattling like a medicine cabinet, so much gear did it contain. He'd chalked up four positives while she was driving for five. He came to the room and blubbed. We watched Marion Jones's face. Cool as a cucumber.

Jones couldn't emerge unscathed but the lesson from that unfortunate association should have been clear to a woman as bright as her. Reputation is a fragile thing. She divorced Hunter. Soon afterwards though she was in cahoots and in love with Tim Montgomery, a fellow sprinter. She gave birth to their son in June of last year and returned to the track this season. Her time with Montgomery has been colourful, Bonnie and Clyde sort of stuff.

The pair raised eyebrows, to say the least of it, by getting into line to be coached by Ben Johnson's old coach Charlie Francis, a man with unreconstructed views on doping. And then, with the smoke from that affair scarcely cleared, she became embroiled in the Balco scandal.

So now, at these Olympic trials, Marion Jones has her own doping investigation to take care of and Montgomery, her partner and the world-record holder in the 100 metres, is staring down the barrel of a lifetime ban from his sport. He and three other track athletes still face charges.

Montgomery is putting up a fight. The US anti-doping agency has charged him with using performance-enhancing drugs. He is battling away through arbitration.

Does it really matter? Can Jones or Montgomery ever look at the world with a straight face again and tell us they are committed to clean sport? Just as you can't be a little bit pregnant you can't be a little bit dirty. Jones has lost so much.

She's lost her reputation and her iconic status. She's lost the right to tell us what to buy through endorsements. She's even lost her closest rival, Kelli White. White is serving a two-year ban arising out of Balco and is co-operating with the federal investigation of the Balco business.

For Jones, as yet no formal charges have been posted. Rumours swirl. She's the biggest fish in the entire murky pond being investigated. Some say there isn't sufficient evidence to haul her in. Others say the authorities are waiting to see what else the Balco case throws up when it goes to trial, probably in the autumn.

And as usual, Jones has reached for the big hitters. Top lawyers and a couple of top political consultants now bend her ear in the way that coaches used to. Her taste runs to bulldogs. The political consultants she has hired include Chris Lehane, who worked on the Lewinsky and Whitewater cases for Bill Clinton and the last presidential election for Al Gore, and is currently battling on Michael Moore's behalf defending Fahrenheit 9/11.

No doubt the man is a beacon of truth and light but his tactics have a familiarity; he has taken the fight to the authorities.

When asked to submit herself for a third interview to the doping authorities, Jones responded with an aggressive declaration of innocence, dropping the words "witch hunt" into the conversation and announcing that she would testify further only in a public forum.

Good luck to her. Good luck to them all. They've taken a sport and tampered with it. They've taken their reputations and rolled them like dice. Sacramento and the hope that pervaded the occasion four years ago are the losers.

Drive for five. Drive for innocence. Whatever. Cynicism reigns again.