Locker Room: There was once this girl and everything about her was a lyric. She came from Thousand Oaks in California and she ran smoother than a poem. She had a smile that could stop your heart and a harum-scarum way about her that disguised the granite in her chest.

She was quick as a fish. When she was 16 years old she ran 100 metres in 11.14 seconds and 200 metres in 22.58 seconds. The Americans told her she could be a reserve on their 4x100 squad. It was like saying, 'Here, girl, have a free Olympic gold medal.' But she said, thanks but no thanks. She said any gold medal she won she wanted to be able to say she'd actually run for it.

Years later you read that quote and looked at those times and then you looked at her beaming face and said that all the things you believed about sprinters could be held in abeyance while you enjoyed Marion Jones's career. It would be a career surely to give sprinting back its credibility and its joy. It would be a career for the ages. You believed.

You loved the fact that she had drifted off to basketball, that she was a hoops genius at college, a team star. She didn't come back to sprinting until 1997 and immediately she illuminated that world. She was a sensation. You wanted her to be epochal, to be the Ali of sprinting, the Michael Jordan, the Georgie Best. She promised she would be.

There were red lights going off in your head till it was flashing like a discotheque of course. When she was 15 she missed an out-of-competition drugs test. And when she missed it she didn't go along and claim she'd been chasing the dog that stole her homework. No. She hired Johnny Cochran. She beat the rap. Same as OJ.

So she hired Johnny Cochran? So what? Maybe he was the first name she saw in the Golden Pages. Remember the night in Berlin in 1998 when you saw her close up running a grand prix race. It was the middle of the week, late in the track season. Everyone was moving on to Moscow for the Saturday night and the season finale. There were a million dollars to be shared for any athlete who won all six grand prix events and the grand final in Moscow. Jones had won in Berlin, effortless and beautiful, and was going to Moscow as the hottest favourite among the four still eligible for a slice of the million.

She came to the press room afterwards and you were sitting in the front row and somebody said to her straight off, " Marion, you've done some great runs but you're still falling short of a record set by Flo Jo . . ." And there was a little pause before the question was finished: "Was she doped?"

And from the front row you saw a cloud of trouble cross Marion Jones's eyes. It was a hard question with an undertow of hostility. Nobody believed in Flo Jo. Marion Jones was moving toward Flo Jo territory. Was she a phenomenon? Should we be worried? Would she take the chance here in Berlin to make a statement on drugs?

She dodged the question. But she looked so like anyone's idea of the most beautiful woman in the world that you said to yourself no kid could be expected to handle a question like that off the bat. Yerra, screw the begrudgers.

You saw her again in close-up at the US Olympic trials in Sacramento in the summer of 2000. By now she was attached to a mobile home called CJ Hunter. As a rule of thumb if a guy is successful in throwing heavy things great distances in competition he is on drugs. CJ was a thrower. CJ had the sour outlook of a man whose testes had been turned to raisins by the gear. We didn't like him or his angry glowering but beside him Marion Jones sat grinning. Beauty and the beast, the headlines said.

What the hell! Maybe he could make her laugh or perhaps was good about the house. Who were we to judge? And hadn't Marion Jones got the chutzpah that summer to announce her "drive for five" gold medals. For America she would be the face of the Olympics. After the foetid sourness of Atlanta she was restoring the faith, bringing back the light.

She was infectious. Everyone thought so. It cost you $40,000 straight up if you wanted her to run at your meet for 11 seconds. Nike were giving her $500,000 a year just to wear their shoes.

This was at a time, remember, when track and field had disappeared off the radar. And here was Marion Jones gracing the front of Vogue. Her face was launching a revolution.

You saw Marion Jones and CJ Hunter together again a few weeks later in Sydney. Ho hum. CJH was on the wrong side of charges that he had virtually toured Europe testing positive at every meet all summer. He had a full medicine chest rattling away inside him. It was the dopiest doping offence of the year. Marion said she'd never seen anything in the bathroom only toothpaste. She said she was sure it was all some kind of misunderstanding.

Marion Jones's face had hardened though. About 18 months later she divorced Hunter. He made some statements about her having been on drugs in Sydney too. He knew because he had watched her inject herself with THG and EPO and human growth hormone. Hell hath no fury like a shot putter scorned? The athletics equivalent of a bunny boiler? We weren't so sure.

By the time CJ began blabbing, Marion Jones was a central figure in the Balco scandal. And those darned men in her life, they just kept getting her into trouble.

In 2003 she gave birth to Monty, son of Tim Montgomery, the fastest man on the planet at the time. Not too long later Tim was busted and started a two-year ban for doping. Marion's former coach Trevor Graham seemed to be involved with an endless series of cheats himself. But hey, no guilt by association, right?

Marion Jones wasn't the harum-scarum kid anymore. She had a posse of lawyers and she fought rough. With the smell of Balco all over her she hustled her way to the Athens Olympics.

Athens was unpleasant and everything since then has been that way too if you are Marion Jones. She fights on shrilly, becoming a pariah in her sport and responding with cartoonish venom to every new doubt and question.

This year she reappeared for the track season looking muscled up and fit. She started winning again. Last year her best 100-metre time was 11.28. This year in Paris on July 8th, Jones ran a winning 10.92 and, at a meet three days later in Lausanne, Switzerland, won in 10.94. In Rome on July 14th, she ran 10.91, her best time in four years.

And a few weeks before that she had won the US nationals in Indianapolis. She ran 11.10 on the track where Flo Jo had set that record. She told the crowd she was back and she was "doing her thing". Right now that sounds like a confession.

This year the Golden Final of the grand prix circuit takes place in Berlin. The meet that once feted her as a new icon for the sport banned her from attending; the stench was too bad. The Weltklasse people in Zürich had stronger stomachs, however, and insisted she be invited there for last Friday night's meet.

On Friday Marion Jones vanished. News of her positive test for EPO at the US national championships had broken. She had run out of front. There was no more chutzpah.

We've been robbed again. Defrauded. Bilked. Duped. Belittled. There was something about Marion. Something refreshing and empowering. She was beautiful and fluid and a lyric on legs. You wanted so badly to believe her. You wanted her to be the girl your kids believed in.

You look back and wonder what sort of 15-year-old hires Johnny Cochran to defend a missed random test. What young woman walks into relationships, personal and professional, with men like CJ Hunter, Tim Montgomery and Trevor Graham and still stands before us shrugging her shoulders and wondering if we're not being a little unfair to her? What sort of woman brasses it all out and still comes back this season more muscled, more juiced than ever, looking for the trail of money and success? What sort of person?

The answer is simple: a career-long fraud and a cheat. Marion Jones's fall has been long and it has been very public . Yet the crash at the bottom of the canyon makes us wince. Once we believed she could fly.