Marion Jones Returns Five Olympic Medals from 2000 Sydney Games

Marion Jones has given up the five medals she won at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and accepted a two-year period of ineligibility, days after admitting she used performance-enhancing drugs.

It wasn't immediately clear where the medals are now. Jones' lawyer, Henry DePippo, said Monday that she had relinquished them, but declined to say who had possession of them. The normal protocol would be for Jones to give them to the U.S. Olympic Committee, which then would return them to the International Olympic Committee, spokeswoman Giselle Davies said.

"The IOC wants to move forward as quickly as possible in getting the facts and sorting out all the issues from the BALCO case," Davies said.

A call to the USOC was not immediately returned, but the group has scheduled a 7 p.m. EDT news conference.

It also wasn't immediately clear what will happen next. The IOC and other sports bodies can go back eight years to strip medals and nullify results. In Jones' case, that would include the 2000 Olympics, where she won gold in the 100 meters, 200 meters and 1,600 relay and bronze in the long jump and 400 relay.

The standings normally would be readjusted, with the second-place finisher moving up to gold, third to silver and fourth to bronze. But the silver medalist in Sydney was Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou, who was suspended for two years after being at the center of a major doping scandal at the Athens Olympics.

That Jones eventually would lose the three gold medals and two bronzes she won in 2000 was a given. She pleaded guilty Friday to lying to federal investigators about using steroids, saying she'd taken "the clear" from September 2000 to July 2001. "The clear" is the designer steroid that's been linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, the lab at the center of the steroids scandal in professional sports.

USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth had called on her to "immediately" give up the medals on her own.

"Her admission is long overdue and underscores the shame and dishonor that are inherent with cheating," Ueberroth said Friday.

Jones had been dogged by suspicions and doping allegations for years, angrily denying all of them. On Friday, though, she told a federal judge that then-coach Trevor Graham gave her a substance that he said was flaxseed oil but was actually "the clear."

"By November 2003, I realized he was giving me performance-enhancing drugs," Jones said Friday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.