Greetings from the San Francisco Bay Area, site of the Ravens-49ers game Sunday -- and home of BALCO, where another elite athlete getting busted for performance-enhancing drugs only made it to the bottom of the front page of the paper that broke nearly every major story about the place.

That's nothing against my former employers, the S.F. Chronicle, because they called it on Marion Jones years ago. It just so happened that word of her confession came through The Washington Post yesterday. She's already made the walk of shame to the courthouse in White Plains, N.Y., today, and very soon will plead guilty to, among other things, lying to investigators about her drug use. Or, to put it another way, to use the Barry Bonds Ploy, the old "I thought it was flaxseed oil'' routine. Which, by the way, has worked well for Barry Bonds, since he hasn't made the walk of shame yet.

(The other obvious Bonds comparison: They appeared to have made their choices for the same reason -- to catch up to the competition. They both were among the best in the world before they started using; Jones was a teenage prodigy, but apparently either plateaued or saw that she was going to plateau in the face of other runners who were using. Next thing you know, she and her colleagues are getting "nutritional supplements'' from Victor Conte, which seemed perfectly legal, mainly because testing procedures at the time couldn't detect them. As a friend and colleague said last night, watch what you say today about some athlete being "clean,'' because you don't know what's been invented already that won't be able to be detected for another five or 10 years.)

Apparently we won't have to wait long before Jones, the American's Golden Girl from 2000 in Sydney, with three golds and two bronzes, gets her medals yanked and her records vacated by the International Olympic Committee, and sees her career ended for good when the World Anti-Doping Agency gets through with her.

Let the asterisks shower begin, again. Told you to be careful how you threw those things around, because you don't know where they'll land. Yeah, yeah, the home-run record -- but now, the reputation of the United States in track and field on the Olympic stage, then, now and probably forever. She's only one of the most decorated American athletes of all time.

If nothing else, though, Marion Jones will go down as one of the most accomplished liars to come through the scene in any sport. Just as smooth, engaging, endearing and convincing as you please. Flash the grin, look dead in your eye, flip on the sincerity and let the falsehoods fly. Sold it so well, a lot of very respectable people in this business mounted heated defenses of her at every turn, talking about how she was being persecuted because she was a big name. (Shocking, then, that when time came to really come clean publicly, it was in the form of a leaked letter to her family and friends, without facing the public she bamboozled all those years.)

I was unfortunate enough to witness a lot of it in the buildup toward Sydney, at Sydney, at between-Games competitions and at the track and field trials for the 2004 Games. Do you vaguely remember the World Track and Field Championships this past summer in Japan? Probably not, because it was barely on TV and barely covered in the papers or elsewhere, and much of the reason given had to do with steroids taint. It was the same way eight years ago. And check out this load of bull-hooey from the Golden Girl, back then in 1999: "Over the last couple of weeks, our beautiful and lovely sport has been marred by all of this.'' She forgot to include: "Marred by people like me.''

But Jones, we now know, has been full of it for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time.

Yet even as we watch her career and reputation crumble, you have to wonder: one by one, the feds are picking off all the major BALCO figures, one way or another -- and they still can't pin anything on Bonds. That completely defies logic. It's like Eliot Ness chasing and chasing Al Capone and getting everyone surrounding and attached to him, and Capone still thumbing his nose at him, going to operas and strolling through hotel lobbies and giving that half-scowl, half-sneer to everyone. OK, I have no idea if he really did that; that scenario was lifted straight from DeNiro in The Untouchables.

The one bright light in all of this: today, even in her moment of international humiliation, would you rather be Marion Jones, or Travis Henry? Or, worse, Travis Henry's kids?

Meanwhile, in another totally unrelated story ... who would you rather be today, Isiah Thomas or Bob Barker?