America adopts a smug silence

Approximately 60 million Americans, or roughly four times as many as were watching at any one time when NBC delivered its taped Olympic excerpts over the previous 17 evenings, watched Tuesday's presidential debate.

Perhaps by prior arrangement, moderator Jim Lehrer refrained from bringing up the touchy subject of Marion Jones. The prospect of taking a position on the glamour girl of American athletics was doubtless unappealing to either candidate. Given the current state of the American sprint queen's popularity, evincing so much as a trace of scepticism about her Down Under performance would have been political suicide. On the other hand, as many Irish politicians have learned firsthand, wholeheartedly embracing an Olympic heroine could prove equally dangerous. A man could wind up looking awfully silly down the road, if and when she wound up pissing in the whiskey. (Or was it the other way around?)

The redolent parallels between Marion Jones and her disgraced shotputter/husband/Svengali C J Hunter and the Michelle Smith-Erik de Bruin union are so uncomfortably apparent that the Irish press and public should probably be commended for their restraint in not gloating even more over the matter.

As the whole world knows by now, a week into the Olympics it was embarrassingly revealed that Mr Marion Jones had failed not one but four drug tests over the summer, having tested positive for nandrolone in amounts 1,000 times the permissible limit.

Jones stood by her man. The response of NBC's commentators, as well as of virtually every American journalist in Sydney, was to express the fervent hope that the cloud cast by her unrepentant husband would not present a "distraction" that might interfere with her own mission.

No one, particularly the television types, seemed even to wonder about the obvious questions. I mean, these two people live under the same roof and eat at the same breakfast table. Are we to assume that they maintained separate medicine cabinets? That they maintained separate training regimens - one clean and one dirty?

Rather, the reaction of many US sportswriters was to interpret the timing of the Hunter revelations as having been calculated to embarrass the Americans for going their own way in the matter of drug testing.

This point is not without some validity. Whereas the international rule, followed by most other countries, calls for drug cheats to be fingered on the spot, the US requirement is that confidentiality be maintained until the appellate process has been exhausted. Fundamentally rooted in the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", this approach is less (as has been widely suggested) a "cover-up" (though in practical terms it may function as one) than it is a system designed to protect the Athletics Congress from an inevitable barrage of lawsuits.

Be that as it may, this Hunter fellow is plainly unpleasant enough. Described, not inaccurately, by a Sydney newspaper as "a hulking, scowling lump of nandrolone", Hunter was a track coach at the University of North Carolina when he initiated his courtship of Jones, then a member of the school's championship basketball team. He talked her into quitting basketball to concentrate on a track career, under his wing. Upon marrying Jones, he then conveniently overlooked support payments for the two children he had with his first wife, who had to take Mr Marion Jones to court over the matter.

And, while we're on the matter of jurisprudence, wasn't it convenient that Johnnie Cochran, the famed attorney who won acquittal in the O J Simpson murder case, just happened to be present in Sydney when the spit hit the fan?

All of this drama took seemingly forever to play itself out. NBC (which paid several hundred million dollars to televise the Games and then did not show, literally, a single minute of them live) milked it for all it was worth, creating such a lingering soap opera out of the five-gold-medals quest that many Americans came away feeling Jones was a failure when she won only three.

The upshot of it is that you can walk into a supermarket this morning and buy your children a box of breakfast cereal with Marion Jones's face on the front. C J Hunter is doubtless lining up other endorsements for his wife as well. But the same people who were wondering how the Irish could be so naive about Michelle Smith four years ago are maintaining a curiously smug silence this time around. There's a certain shame in that as well.