Three years later, Jones would enter territory where even Lewis and Jesse Owens did not venture.

At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the American planned to add the 4x400 metres relay gold to the 100, 200, 4x100 and long jump titles won by Lewis in Los Angeles in 1984 and Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Jones finished with three gold and two bronze medals, was featured on the covers of Vogue, Time and Newsweek magazines and clinched multi-million dollar contracts.

Seven years later the 32-year-old was a sporting pariah.

The Jones story began in Los Angeles. She idolised 1988 Olympic double sprint champion Florence Griffith Joyner, who was to die in her sleep 10 years later, and became a top athlete.

There was one small blot on her CV. As a teenager Jones missed a drugs test and her mother hired a lawyer to avoid a four-year sanction. Her choice was Johnnie Cochrane, who successfully defended OJ Simpson on a murder charge.

She was married to burly shot putter CJ Hunter, who won the world title at the 1999 Seville world championships but pulled out of the Sydney Games citing a knee injury.

In Sydney, Jones romped to victory in the 100 and 200 and won bronze in the long jump and 4x100 relay. An astonishing third leg in the 4x400 gave the American a third gold. But by then a shadow had fallen over Sydney after Hunter admitted he had tested positive for nandrolone four times in 1999.

Jones stood expressionless beside her man at a packed news conference. So too did Cochrane and former jazz musician Victor Conte, who explained he was Hunter’s nutritionist and said the positive tests must have been the result of a contaminated iron supplement. Conte was head of the BALCO laboratory.

... contd.