AFTER it was announced on Friday at a courthouse in White Plains, New York, that Marion Jones would spend six months in prison, beginning not later than March 11, there was widespread condemnation of the former Olympic champion and very little sympathy.

Craig Masback, the chief executive of USA Track and Field, expressed a view shared by many. “She will be recognised and demonised as one of the biggest cheats in sporting history,” he said. “Like the Black Sox [who were ostracised for deliberately throwing games]. Choose your other villains. I don’t think she can be viewed any other way.”

We cannot argue too strongly with Judge Kenneth Karas’s imposition of a jail sentence because Jones lied to federal prosecutors about her steroid use and would have known when doing so that she was committing a serious crime. But in becoming the first international superstar to be given prison time, Jones is unlucky.

Were all of those who raced against her clean? Of course not, but most of them live in countries where the manufacture and illegal distribution of performance-enhancing drugs is not a priority for those who police the law. Jones got her steroids from Victor Conte, the head of the Balco laboratory who was investigated by the federal investigators, those who found Jones’s name all over incriminating documents.

On one level, it is difficult to understand why she lied with so much evidence against her. On another level, it was entirely understandable. Athletes across a broad range of sports have lied for years and years about their doping and have been helped by dishonest coaches, disinterested administrators and compliant journalists. We have given the public what we imagine they want and it has been a lie.

And when the lie is discovered, we do what Masback has done: paint the cheat in the darkest colours and portray her as a villain. She should be recognised and demonised as one of the biggest cheats in sports history, said Masback, right up with the Black Sox who sold a World Series. And in this way, another sports official conveys an impression that it is the bad guys in a minority who are being caught: the Black Sox and Marion Jones.

Nothing could be further from the reality and nothing could be as damaging to the pursuit of a solution. Doping remains endemic in many sports and is very much part of the culture of athletics. Jones won three gold medals at the 2000 Olympics while racing against athletes who were cheating just as she was.

The medals that she handed back after admitting her dishonesty have not been redistributed because the Olympic authorities are not sure about some of those who finished directly behind her. How can anyone speak of Jones being a greater fraud than all the others who cheated? Is she a bigger cheat than the countless former East German athletes who doped from the beginning to the ends of their careers?

Unlike Jones, their names remain in the Olympic record books, even though we now know the dosages of banned drugs that fuelled their performances.

There is a lesson to the parable of Marion Jones and it is this: athletes who dope are pretty safe when policed by sport’s ruling class but once the real police move in, things become dangerous.

Jones didn’t make that distinction when she lied to the police and, perhaps, she deserved six months for stupidity. For a woman with two young children, it is a tough sentence.

If sport’s doping laws are to be properly enforced, there will have to be greater police involvement and a more aggressive pursuit of those who supply and abuse performance-enhancing drugs. Baseball in the United States has been rocked by the publication of the Mitchell Report into the use of banned drugs in its sport. That report was, to a large degree, based on police investigations into Balco and the activities of a steroid distributor, Kirk Radomski.

For so long indifferent to the scourge of drugs in sport, the US is currently leading the way, and the effect on baseball has been enormous. Next month the All Star pitcher Roger Clemens will appear before the US Congress to give his reaction to the Mitchell Report, which alleges that he doped. Last weekend Clemens pleaded his innocence but convinced few. He says he will tell Congress that he has never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs. If, sometime in the future, it is proven he lied to Congress, he will find himself facing what Jones now faces.

Baseball’s other big star, Barry Bonds, is another man with questions to answer. He was implicated in the Balco scandal, denied to investigators that he knowingly used steroids and is now accused of perjury. If he is convicted, he follows Jones. Looking at what is happening in the US, sports enthusiasts in other countries may consider that something is rotten in the state of America.

To see what is wrong in professional sport, they need not look so far.

Marion Jones’s medals

Olympics (all 2000) 100m gold, 200m gold, 4x400m gold, 4x100m bronze, long jump bronze

World championships 100m gold (1997, 1999), 200m gold (2001), 4x100m gold (2001), 100m silver (2001) long jump bronze (1999)

Jones was stripped of all her medals and results from September 2000