Marion Jones cries as she leaves the US Federal courthouse in White Plains, New York, on Friday. (Reuters)

White Plains: On the day she admitted publicly to using performance-enhancing drugs, former Olympic track champion Marion Jones wept on Friday as she stood on the steps of the United States District Courthouse here and apologised for her mistakes.

She also announced she was retiring from track and field.

Inside the courtroom, she did not waver when confessing in a strong voice to the judge that she had made false statements in two separate government investigations: the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative case and a check-fraud case.

Jones repeatedly answered the judge’s questions by saying, “Yes, I understand”, as he explained the ramifications of her guilty plea. The prosecutors have recommended a sentence of no more than six months, according to the agreement. The maximum sentence is five years. She will be sentenced in January.

The International Olympic Committee has indicated it will not wait until then to move to strip her of the five medals she won — including three gold — at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Jones, 31, was released after yielding her US passport and promising to yield her passport from Belize, her mother’s native country. But in her emotional speech outside the courthouse, she made it clear that she believed she had lost far more.

“It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you that I have betrayed your trust,” she said, referring to her fans and supporters. She added: “You have the right to be angry with me. I have let them down, I have let my country down and I have let myself down.”

Her guilty plea, as well as her admission in court that she used performance-enhancing drugs provided by her former coach Trevor Graham, were big developments in the government’s case against Graham for making false statements to federal agents. Graham’s trial is scheduled to begin in November.

Jones said in court that from September 2000 until July 2001, Graham gave her a substance he told her was flaxseed oil. But after she stopped training with him in 2001, she said she realised it had been a performance-enhancing drug.

By the time she was interviewed in the Balco investigation in November 2003, Jones said, she knew it was the designer steroid THG, known as “The Clear”. But she had denied recognising the substance and denied taking it in that Balco interview.

“Both were lies,” Jones said.

She similarly admitted lying to federal officials investigating the bank-fraud case in two separate interviews in August and September 2006. At that time, she denied receiving a fraudulent $25,000 check that she had endorsed and denied knowing about the involvement of Montgomery.