By JIM LITKE

AP Sports Columnist

Marion Jones could have walked away with five Olympic medals and the starring role in a few of her sport’s most stirring dramas, and all her critics would have owned were doubts. So maybe even more surprising than her positive drug test is that Jones was reckless enough to tempt fate one more time.

But that’s the way it is with winning. If you think drugs are addictive, imagine how it must have felt to win as often and as spectacularly as she did.

The summer of 2006 won’t be remembered for the incendiary way the Tigers played – that would be both Woods, the golfer, and Detroit, the baseball team – or for the way Italy’s World Cup team kept its head when almost everyone else around them was losing theirs.

It will be remembered, instead, as the summer of drug busts.

First Floyd Landis, the Tour de France champion, then Justin Gatlin, co-owner of the world’s fastest man title. And now, pending the results of a “B” sample test, Jones.

In her case, it comes at the end of a long-running battle with drug testers, whose suspicions were aroused by her connections to the BALCO lab and founder Victor Conte, and strengthened by a series of investigations since. And depending on how grand jury proceedings stemming from the same probe play out over the next few weeks, Barry Bonds might get invited to make it a foursome.

What those athletes have piled up – in addition to hefty legal fees – are accomplishments. And all four are Americans. Those two things combined proves that nobody – not even the biggest drawing cards in their respective fields – is above the law.

If the most-talented and hardest-working competitors, already armed with the best of everything, decide to go on the juice at some point, you don’t want to know what’s going on below. And anybody who thinks this is just cycling’s problem, or track and field’s, ask yourself why Bonds isn’t the only guy in baseball who has grown a few hat sizes, or how NFL players continue to fill up parking spaces usually reserved for doublewide trailers.

In every athletic endeavor, a kid whose gift is identified early is handed a blank sheet of paper. The goal they put on top is to be the best. For the toughest, most dedicated or talented few, that never changes. For the rest, reality sets in at some point, and being better than most becomes good enough. But for all of them, eventually, it becomes a matter of holding their place.

What drug testing has confirmed – whether it’s the rigorous Olympic-caliber programs that nabbed Landis, Gatlin and perhaps Jones, or the barely credible MLB variety that put the Mets’ light-hitting Yusaku Iriki on ice for a while – is that a lot of athletes have turned to drugs to hold those places.

Exactly how many poses an even more intriguing question. Landis and Gatlin tested positive for testosterone, Jones for the blood-booster EPO, and nearly all the baseball players, so far, have been caught using some kind of steroid. But few sports test blood samples and even fewer tests can detect human growth hormone, which offers broader benefits across the strength, speed and endurance spectrums than many of its performance-enhancing predecessors.

And just over the horizon are more designer steroids like the one that sparked the BALCO investigation, and innovations like IGF-1, or insulin-like growth factor-1, a protein that was engineered to promote muscle growth and repair in older folks but offers a wealth or sports applications, too. All those possibilities not only raise questions about the present and future credibility of our games, they serve to undermine our confidence in the past.

Landis’ positive test ruined what had been one of the most heroic feats in the long and already stained history of the Tour de France. Gatlin’s positive turned an Olympic medal into fool’s gold and his record 100-meter dash earlier this season into an illusion. The memory of Jones’ magical nights in Sydney may turn out to be good for little more than a laugh on “YouTube.”

Jones falling in with that crowd can’t be called a surprise. Not after her former husband, shot-putter C.J. Hunter, was busted, and her former boyfriend, Tim Montgomery, was run out of track, and her sometimes coach, Trevor Graham, was locked out.

No, the surprising thing is that she may not have known when to stop. Jones gone four years without winning anything, and all the while the heat was on her trail. Yet she turned up at the U.S. Championships in Indianapolis a few months back and won the 100, running as if time and trouble hadn’t laid a hand on her.

But now that victory, like all the others, stands to be wiped away. And all because Jones didn’t know when to say when.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org

AP-ES-08-19-06 2003EDT