Most sports pages celebrate the home team. Even The New York Times dwells on local sports and has an entire section devoted to the Olympics that is filled with U.S.-laden pieces.

Sports pages take you to task after you fail to win, not before. So it takes an outlandish ego and bizarre agenda to attack an athlete just before one of the biggest races of her career. Meet Jeré Longman, the Tonya Harding of sports reporting.

Longman attacked one of America's biggest name amateur athletes - hurdler Lolo Jones - just before her Olympic race in a piece titled: "For Lolo Jones, Everything Is Image."  Jones is famous not just as an Olympian, but as a Christian who believes in waiting for marriage before she has sex.

An incredulous Jones went on NBC's "Today" after her fourth-place finish, just out of the medals. Jones noted that only a year before "I was having spinal cord surgery." And followed that with two hamstring problems.