MADID - FUTURE record books may show there was no winner of the women's 100 meters at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

IOC officials said on Thursday they are considering the unprecedented step of leaving the gold-medal spot vacant following Marion Jones' confession that she used performance-enhancing drugs.

'That could be a solution,' said IOC board member Denis Oswald, a member of the three-man disciplinary commission dealing with the Jones case.

'In a way, it's logical and consistent that we should just move her up, but there is another feeling,' Mr Oswald said in an interview during a break in the world anti-doping conference. 'We'll see how insistent she Ms Thanou) is. The best way would be not to do anything and just leave it as it is and there is no gold.'

IOC president Jacques Rogge said no final decision had been made but that 'anything was possible', including leaving the result blank.

Last week, Mr Rogge said the IOC only would upgrade athletes who were determined to be 'clean'. Jones won gold medals in the 100 metres, 200 and the 1,600-metre relay in Sydney, as well as bronzes in the 400 relay and long jump.

After acknowledging last month that she started doping before those Olympics, Jones returned all five medals to the IOC.

Pauline Davis-Thompson of the Bahamas won the silver behind Jones in the 200, with Sri Lanka's Susanthika Jayasinghe third and Jamaica's Beverly McDonald fourth.

The IOC is awaiting recommendations from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) before deciding on how to revise the medals. The IAAF council is scheduled to consider the case next week.

The IAAF and IOC also must decide whether Jones' American relay teammates should lose their medals. Jamaica finished second in the 1,600-metre relay, with Russia third and Nigeria fourth. France was fourth behind the United States in the 400 relay.

The IOC ruling could come at the Dec 10 to 12 executive board meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland. If not, the next IOC board meeting is in April in Beijing.

Audit
Wada president Dick Pound, meanwhile, said he would like an 'audit' of all of Jones' doping tests to learn how she was able to beat the system for so long.

'It is not much fun to find that someone who has been tested 160 times admits to doping,' he said. 'I am not happy to hear that someone who had that many tests was a user for that many years.'

Wada director general David Howman cited the Jones case as an example of how police investigations are increasingly crucial in catching drug cheats. He noted that Jones only confessed after being accused of lying to investigators about her steroid use and her association with a check-fraud scheme.

'She is an example of how an athlete can beat the system of sample collection,' Mr Howman said.

'One-hundred-sixty samples were taken from that athlete and not one resulted in an adverse finding ... It was only when faced with the unenviable prospect of going to jail for a long time that the athlete confessed that she had cheated.' -- AP