THE future’s bright, the future’s a syringe. This has been the mantra for a timeline of cheats who have long besmirched their sport with tainted ambition and unbridled selfishness. It seemed entirely apposite when, in the 1970s, one Tour De France rider was banned for using a sample donated by a colleague. This is the sleazy underbelly of a world where people are so disrespectful that they even take someone else’s p***.

So step forward Marion Jones. Few athletes are more inextricably associated with the doping culture that means every world record set by a sprinter, or every mindboggling journey up the Alpe d’Huez, is clouded by a fog of suspicion. It does not help, of course, when a pariah such as Ben Johnson serves a life ban in two years. A fantastically quick time, yes, but a tolerance reading that reflects badly on all.

But hang on a minute. Jones has never actually been found guilty of anything. She has never even been charged. In a sport in which it is not unusual to flout the rules and miscreants used to shop at Balco, the drugs lab of choice, she is an innocent.

Last night she made her first appearance in this country since Gateshead in 2004. Since then she has had what she termed a “bad patch”. That has included being accused of injecting drugs into her stomach during the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where she won five medals, and seeing her partner, Tim Montgomery, banned.

She has also been savaged in a Martin Bashir interview and has had a baby. “People can point fingers but the naysayers are not going to ruin my life,” she said after finishing second to Sherone Simpson, the Commonwealth champion, in the 100 metres at Crystal Palace. She had not been worried about the attitude of the crowd because “every city, every country I go to, the reception is incredible. For some reason I have not been invited back for the past few years”.

That thinly veiled bitterness is understandable. She has been found guilty only by association. Call it naive, but you cannot condemn someone because you do not like their husband, and why should we believe the word of her former nutritionist, Victor Conte, the Balco founder who said that he devised a drug programme for her, when he is a selfconfessed cheat? Indeed, Jones might have asked why nobody was talking of Torri Edwards in the preamble to last night. The American is back racing after serving a 15-month ban. Yet nobody was interested in Edwards and nikethamide, just Jones and whether she had been dropped by Nike.

But can she still cut it at 30? A slight headwind meant that last night’s times were not great, Simpson recording 11sec dead, Jones 11.05 and Edwards 11.26. It is eight years since Jones set her best of 10.65, but she is adamant that she can get back to that level. “When it comes to the big races I will be ready,” she said. The biggest is the 2008 Olympic final in Beijing, but “one gold medal is not going to be sufficient”. The ambition remains unchecked.

Beaten by Simpson in their past two meetings, the scriptwriters are rooting for Jones. Three golds in Sydney segueing into a post-Balco, post-natal slump and then a nostalgia-fest. She is the second-fastest woman in the world this year and has a teardrop tattooed on her left shoulder. This is the stuff of stirring romance.