USA Track & Field urged Bush not to pardon Jones.

The newly appointed chief executive of USA Track & Field has sent a strongly worded letter to President Bush, asking him not to pardon the disgraced sprinter Marion Jones or commute the six-month jail sentence she is serving for lying to investigators about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and about her role in a check-fraud case.

“Our country has long turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of our heroes,” Doug Logan wrote in an open letter to President Bush. Logan was named chief executive of the sport’s national governing body last week. “If you have athletic talent or money or fame, the law is applied much differently than if you are slow or poor or an average American trying to get by. At the same time, all sports have for far too long given the benefit of the doubt to its heroes who seem too good to be true, even when common sense indicates they are not.

“To reduce Ms. Jones’s sentence or pardon her would send a horrible message to young people who idolized her, reinforcing the notion that you can cheat and be entitled to get away with it. A pardon would also send the wrong message to the international community. Few things are more globally respected than the Olympic Games, and to pardon one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the Olympic movement would be nothing less than thumbing our collective noses at the world.”
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