Absurdity, Allegory and China

“The ultimate would be to compete in a couple more Olympics, hopefully break some world records and wind up my sports career with a couple of years in the WNBA.”
–Marion Jones

So much for dreams, Olympic or otherwise. Instead of attending the Beijing Olympics as a competitor, Marion Jones is serving six months in a Texas federal prison for pathologically lying about her use of performance enhancing drugs. Along the way she claimed a string of incidental victims, including her relay partners at the Sydney 2000 Olympics who are now fighting to keep their medals. Though her Olympic dreams have been altered, they have obviously not been totally abandoned. She wants out a jail (who doesn’t?), and she’s appealed to President George Bush for a commutation of her sentence less than three weeks before the beginning of the Beijing Olympics, whose opening ceremonies Mr. Bush plans to attend. By my calculations she only has about 6 weeks left to serve. It is easy to call this one a no-brainer if it were not for so many other ‘no brainers’ that Mr. Bush has haplessly fumbled.

In an open letter to President Bush, Douglas Logan, the new CEO of US Track and Field, has urged Mr. Bush to not commute her sentence, seeing a potential early release as an undermining of the current efforts to keep drugs out of track and field. It’s in Bush’s court now, and though this seems like an obvious slam-dunk no, if recent history is any indication, this one could go either way. It is, after all, sports, politics AND Texas.