ATHENS – For her sake, and for her country’s, Marion Jones had better be telling the truth, now more than ever, because now, officially, she is no longer running alone in her quest to outpace the whispers and the shadows.

Her name was on the start lists early in the morning, but the reality of what’s now at stake didn’t turn official until much later, just before 10 a.m. local time, when Jones stripped down to her running suit, jumped up and down a couple of times and walked onto the track, into her No. 2 position on the women’s 4×100 relay team.

That quickly, the stakes were raised ever higher. And the theory of Marion Jones became the reality of Marion Jones.

“It really was an amazing feeling being out there again, on the track, in a different way than it was last night, when I qualified for the long jump,” Jones said after the U.S. easily qualified for tonight’s relay finals, cruising in its semifinal heat.

“When you’re there with the other people on the team, and not just by yourself, that’s when you remember that you’re at a meet, that you’re all part of the same team. It’s a very special feeling.”

If being such a good teammate was as important to Jones as she says, then she would have passed on participating in the relay, because her presence can only diminish their imminent accomplishments.

Jones, like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and the others in the BALCO mess, is learning the same difficult lesson: You can’t wish your worries away by hoping they’ll just disappear.

Jones owed it to track and field, and to the U.S. Olympic team, to take a pass on this race. She certainly owed it to the other members of the relay team, Lauryn Williams, Angela Williams and LaTasha Colander.

The moment Jones took the baton at the 100-meter marker of this 400-meter race, she put everyone else on the U.S. team in jeopardy, made them all a target. And possibly set them all up for what would be one of the most calamitous falls in Olympic history.

“I’m just happy to be a part of all this,” Jones said.

So she’d better be telling the truth. She’d better be the victim of a remarkably vast set of circumstances, if not out-and-out conspiracies. Because it was one thing when Jones decided to compete in the long-jump qualifier Wednesday.

The long jump is an individual event, with solitary successes and consequences following in its wake. Now it’s about the team. Now it concerns everyone else.

Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, took a lot of heat earlier in the Games when he made specific reference to Jones.

“If she’s innocent and she comes here, that’s fine,” he said. “And if she’s not and comes here and has made all of those statements [of innocence], it’s going to be a dark and deep hole into which she goes. It would be a shame.”

Only now, she won’t go there alone. Now, if it turns out she’s been deceiving us and lying to herself, she drags Williams, Williams and Colander with her. She besmirches the good name of the U.S. Olympic team, which has managed – in a Games lousy with returned medals and urine tests so dirty they nearly broke the testing machines – to stay above it all. Even the maligned track team.

If the U.S. wants to remain at the forefront of the vigilant fight for clean competitions, it needs to remain virginal and drug-free. Maybe Marion Jones is what she says she is, maybe she’s clean, maybe she has been simply surrounding herself with too many people through the years who tend to use too many needles.

Maybe she really is innocent.

She’d better be. Especially now.