JONES

MELBOURNE (AP):

ATHLETICS LUMINARY Sebastien Coe doubts the sport would survive another doping scandal the likes of one which last month landed Marion Jones a prison sentence.

Coe, who won two Olympic 1,500-metres gold medals and is now head of the London 2012 Olympics organising committee, said spectators and fans deserved not to be deceived by drug cheats.

"The one thing that you have to cling very firmly to is that if audiences, crowds and spectators believe for one moment that what they're watching is illegitimate, we might as well all be watching WWF wrestling," he said at a luncheon here two days ahead of tonight's (Ja time) Melbourne Athletics Grand Prix.

Former Olympic and world athletics champion Jones was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to investigators about do-ping and a cheque-fraud conspiracy.

After long denying she had ever used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted last October she lied to federal investigators in November 2003, acknowledging she took the designer steroid, the 'Clear', from September 2000 to July 2001. The Clear has been linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, the lab at the centre of the steroids scandal in professional sports.

Before being sentenced to prison, she was forced to return the three gold and two bronze medals she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The Jones case "has put some systems in place and woken a few people up to the damage that one or two people in a concerted system of cheating can actually wreak on your sport," Coe said, "We cannot have another five years like we've just been through because I'm not sure the sport wouldsurvive that."