Last Updated: 1:35am GMT 1/14/2008

The sad ending to the Marion Jones saga took place on Friday when she was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to a Federal Grand Jury.

	Marion Jones

I have been a harsh critic of Marion since she hired Charlie Francis, the disgraced former coach of Ben Johnson, back in 2002. I wrote then in The Daily Telegraph that due to the poor decisions that Marion had already made to that point, that I predicted that the greatest female athlete of this era would probably disappoint us all eventually.

I had no idea it would get to be this bad. To recap, she first married shot putter C J Hunter, whom she met when he was married and a coach of the track team at the University of North Carolina, where Marion was a standout athlete.

It was announced at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 that C J had tested positive for steroids. They ultimately divorced and C J claimed later that he had injected Marion with steroids. She later became involved with and had a son with sprinter Tim Montgomery, who eventually broke the world record for 100 metres but was later banned from athletics as part of the BALCO scandal. Marion hired Francis in 2002 and tried to keep this a secret from the track world and later ended that relationship when she came under intense criticism for that decision. She then hired former sprinter and Olympic gold medallist, Steve Riddick, as her coach.

Riddick and Montgomery were both part of the cheque-cashing scam which resulted in a five-year prison sentence for Riddick, and Montgomery is to be sentenced in...