"Those could have been used to satisfy Coach Pfaff 's judgment if Miss Jones weren't so selfish, " says Skip Davis, his attorney. "And saw fit, too, to satisfy her legal obligations rather than just give them over to a different organisation."

Forty-eight hours earlier, Jones had handed the three golds and two bronze back to the United States Olympic Committee as the debate about whether she should be applauded or admonished for her recent actions rumbled on. It is so rare for a modern athlete to make any sort of admission of steroid guilt that many want to think the best of her newlypenitent image. To some, however, the whole episode reeks of one of those death-bed conversions where the soon-to-expire atheist demands to see a priest. The circumstantial evidence certainly leans heavily in the latter direction.

Apart from her ludicrous claim she thought the designer steroid "the clear" was just flaxseed oil, the timeline she's given isn't credible. According to the latest version of events, Graham began giving her "the clear" in September, 2000. The problem is most athletics pundits reckon Jones was at her peak during the 1998 season when she won 35 out of 36 events in the 100m, 200m, 400m and Long Jump on five different continents.

Indeed, between August, 1997 and August, 1999, she set her all-time bests in three of those four disciplines.

Yet, she now expects people to believe she only began her inadvertent steroid use during the build-up to Sydney and was clean before that.

Then, there's the issue of motivation. As her parlous financial circumstances indicate, she has nothing to lose now and everything to gain by changing her story so completely.

Coming clean was really the last card she had left to play. All but finished as a competitive athlete, her mea culpa (however nuanced) satisfied the government's desperation to properly snare at least one high-profile athlete from the BALCO affair and seriously reduced the weight of her prison sentence. It also kick-started the second act of her own life. On 11 January next, a judge will most likely sentence her to six months in jail but after that the fun can begin again.

Firstly, there will be a book deal. In America, there's always a book deal.

No matter how enormous the lie told or the fraud perpetrated, publishers queue up for the rights to tell the tale.

Cognisant of how well Jones will perform in front of the camera (an ability that makes her theatrics on the courthouse steps last week look very like crocodile tears) when flogging the story on television, they will be talking about advances well into the six-figure range. Nothing plays better in these parts than a good morality tale laced with a dose of self-flagellation.

Anybody who thinks Jones didn't figure all this into her decision to end the long-running charade that was her career is just being naive and doesn't know how the American media industry works. Just about 12 months from now, there will most likely be a space reserved for her on Oprah Winfrey's couch. That will be where the book is launched from. To the sympathetic nods of the host, she will explain her bad choices as the consequence of overwhelming pressure to please greedy sponsors and the malign influence of the myriad bad men with whom she had romantic and professional relationships.

And a lot of viewers will take this at face value and empathise.

Then there'll be a movie. It may not be a Hollywood blockbuster with Spike Lee at the helm. It might just be a small-scale television job on CBS some Sunday night. But there will be a movie and the rights to that will refurbish her bank balance quickly enough too. The athlete who was commercially savvy enough to earn $80,000 just to turn up for a race and $3m a year in endorsements from Nike must have realised once the federal agents were on her trail there was far more money to be had embracing contrition now rather than persisting with increasingly ridiculous denials.

All of this too needs to be viewed through the prism of America's bizarre relationship with steroids.

"Hey, it's not really a big deal, " is a common refrain around these parts.

Every Saturday morning, infomercials peddling HGH (human growth hormone) fill television time slots, and across the country gyms and high schools are overrun with the stuff.

The easy availability may explain the ambivalence. It's common to listen to fans claiming they don't care how the great sporting feats get done as long as they get to witness them. It doesn't help either that the stigma attached to being caught using isn't the same as in Ireland or Europe.

Consider the fate of some of the other athletes snared in the BALCO net. Barry Bonds, the originator and somebody still clinging to the facetious flaxseed oil defence, received a congratulatory phone call from President George Bush when he broke Hank Aaron's all-time home run record earlier this summer. As many as 300 of his career long balls were hit during his, ahem, alleged steroidusing years yet his dispatch of number 756 was deemed the greatest moment of this baseball season by the sports channel ESPN. There was no media outrage about the choice either. And what's the difference between him and Jones?

How about Bill Romanowski? A legendary NFL linebacker and winner of four Super Bowls, he was another BALCO client. Since retiring in 2003 following a violent assault on an Oakland Raiders' teammate in training, he's admitted to steroid use. He's also been busy carving out a neat sideline in movies, fronting a health supplements company, and doing television commentary on grid-iron games. Earlier this year, he was the honorary pace car driver at a NASCAR event in Texas. The only difference between Romanowski and Jones is that his sport is America's most popular, and her's is a minority interest that people tune into once every four years during the Olympics.

As this rumbles on, Jones's shot at redemption will be helped too by so many other sprinters of her generation being dirty. If the 100m gold from Sydney gets handed over to second-placed finisher Katerina Thanou, it will make a laughing stock of the war on steroids and do wonders for the American's reputation. Nobody in athletics believes Thanou was a clean competitor. Equally, the debate about whether Jones's relay teammates from 2000 should hand back their medals too has unwittingly boosted her standing. That Chryste Gaines and Torri Edwards from the 4 x 100m line-up were also exposed for cheating will lend credence to any Jones's assertion that everybody was at it. Of course, more holes may yet be poked in Jones's story.

On 26 November, Graham will, unless he does a deal with prosecutors in the meantime, be in a San Francisco court on trial for three counts of lying to federal agents. Apart from the coach and Jones testifying, the potential witness list also includes her ex-husband CJ Hunter, the father of her first child Tim Montgomery, and Victor Conte, the founder of the BALCO laboratory. What chance that quartet of men give her more reasons to sob on another set of courthouse steps?