Marion Lois Jones (born October 12, 1975), also known as Marion Jones-Thompson, is an American former world champion track and field athlete and former professional basketball player. She won three gold medals and two bronze medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, but was later stripped of her medals after admitting to steroid use. Jones was one of the most famous athletes to be linked to the BALCO scandal. The performance enhancing substance usage scandal covered more than 20 top level athletes, including Jones's ex-husband, shot putter C.J. Hunter, and 100 m sprinter Tim Montgomery, the father of Jones's first child. Jones has also played professional basketball in the WNBA, as point guard in the team of Tulsa Shock between 2010 and 2011. Personal life Marion Jones was born to George Jones and his wife, Marion, (originally from Belize) in Los Angeles, California. She holds dual citizenship with the United States and Belize. Her parents split when she was very young, and Jones's mother remarried a retired postal worker, Ira Toler, three years later. Toler became a stay-at-home dad to Jones and her older half-brother, Albert Kelly, until his sudden death in 1987. Jones turned to sports as an outlet for her grief: running, pickup basketball games, and anything else her brother Albert was doing athletically. By the age of 15, she was routinely dominating California high school athletics both on the track and the basketball court. Jones is also a 1997 graduate of the University of North Carolina (UNC). While there, she met and began dating one of the track coaches, shot putter C.J. Hunter. Hunter voluntarily resigned his position at UNC to comply with the requirements of university rules prohibiting coach-athlete dating. Jones and Hunter were married on October 3, 1998, and trained for the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, Jones declared that she intended to win gold medals in all five of her competition events at Sydney. Jones's husband, C.J. Hunter, had withdrawn from the shot-put competition for a knee injury, though he was allowed to keep his coaching credentials and attend the games to support his wife. However, just hours after Marion Jones won her first of the planned five golds, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Hunter had failed four pre-Olympic drug tests, testing positive each time for the banned anabolic steroid nandrolone. Hunter was immediately