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NEW YORK: Disgraced former 100m world record holder Tim Montgomery
was sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison Friday for his
role in a check fraud scheme that also led to the downfall of Marion
Jones.
US District Court Judge Kenneth Karas imposed
the sentence upon Montgomery, once considered the world’s fastest
man before being banned from athletics as a dope cheat and having
his record-setting run stricken from the books.
Montgomery, facing a July trial in
Virginia on heroin distribution charges, had pleaded guilty 13
months ago to conspiring to commit bank fraud and two counts of bank
fraud in a multimillion-dollar counterfeiting scheme.
Jones, the mother of his son Tim Jr., is serving
a six-month prison sentence after pleading guilty last year to
making false statements under oath about the fraud scheme and lying
when saying she didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs.
Jones was stripped of the five medals she won at
the Sydney Olympics.
Their former coach, Steve Riddick, was found
guilty in federal court of bank fraud and money laundering charges
stemming from the scheme, in which Montgomery’s agent, Charles
Wells, also pleaded guilty.
Montgomery’s epic slide from the summit of the
sporting world came after his lawyers agreed with prosecutors that
an appropriate sentence would range from 37 to 46 months, the judge
imposing the maximum within that range.
Montgomery, 33, was already behind bars, having
been arrested April 30 on charges he conspired to distribute more
than 100 grams of heroin in 2007 and 2008.
Neither Jones nor Montgomery ever tested
positive for steroids, but the once-undetectable steroid THG was at
the heart of the BALCO steroid scandal to which both were linked.
Montgomery won the 2000 Sydney Olympic gold in
the 4x100m relay and a silver medal in the same event at the 1996
Atlanta Olympics despite not appearing in the finals of either race.
Montgomery retired in 2005 after receiving a
two-year ban from athletics based upon evidence linking him to the
BALCO scandal, a ban that wiped out his world-record 100-meter run
of 9.78 seconds on September 2002 in Paris.
-- AFP
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