Officials hope Jones sentence is deterrent

SALVO, North Carolina (Reuters) - The world governing body for athletics hopes the six-month prison sentence handed down to disgraced American Olympic sprinter Marion Jones will deter others from taking dugs, it said on Friday.

"There is a lot of sadness for Marion and her family," International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) spokesman Nick Davies said after Jones was sentenced for lying about her steroid use and her knowledge of a fraud case.

"Six months in prison is a lot," Davies told Reuters by telephone from IAAF headquarters in Monte Carlo.

"But you do hope that it will be a deterrent to others.

"Hopefully when she is out of prison she can help the IAAF and other organizations to ensure that other people don't follow the path that she certainly followed.

"It (her doping) has certainly hurt the image of the sport."

Jones, the first woman to win five athletics medals, three of them gold, at a single Olympics, has been stripped of her 2000 Sydney Games medals.

All her results since September 2000 were wiped from the record books after her tearful admission in October to steroid use after years of denial.

USA Track & Field (USATF), the sport's U.S. governing body, also hoped Jones's downfall would serve as a lesson.

"The revelation that one of the sport's biggest stars took performance-enhancing drugs and repeatedly lied about it, in addition to being a party to fraud, has no silver lining," USATF president Bill Roe and outgoing chief executive officer Craig Masback said in a statement.

'MORALITY PLAY'

"It is a vivid morality play that graphically illustrates the wages of cheating in any facet of life, on or off the track."

World Anti-Doping Agency director general David Howman underscored how lying had undone Jones.

"This case is a very sad example of an athlete who has cheated but denied it for years, until it reached the level of perjury," Howman said in a statement.

"From a situation where sporting sanctions only would have occurred had the athlete acknowledged her cheating, she instead went to prison for committing perjury and also incurred sporting sanctions."

United States Olympic Committee chief Jim Scherr said in a statement: "The fact that an athlete with so much talent and promise, who so many people looked up to, made the decision to cheat is a terrible disappointment.

"This unfortunate situation does, however, offer a lesson to young people about the importance of making good choices and honoring the value of clean competition."

Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO laboratory at the centre of the U.S. doping scandal, said he felt sorry for Jones's family.

"Marion did make some very poor choices and she does deserve serious consequences. I certainly don't condone her repeated lies," Conte said in a statement.

"But, I do feel especially bad for Marion's mother and her two children. They didn't lie or cheat or use performance enhancing drugs, yet they are also enduring great pain."

(Editing by John O'Brien)