Three female Jamaican Olympians are expected to get a share of the redistribution of medals won and then later stripped from disgraced American sprinter Marion Jones.

While the 100-metre gold medal won by Jones at the Sydney Games in 2000 will remain vacant, thirdplace finisher Jamaican Tanya Lawrence will move up to the silver and fellow Jamaican Merlene Ottey from fourth to bronze. Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou would keep her silver, meaning Lawrence would get a duplicate medal.

In the 200 metres, the gold will go to Pauline Davis-Thompson of Bahamas, with Sri Lanka’s Susanthika Jayasinghe promoted from bronze to silver and Jamaica’s Beverly McDonald from fourth to third.

The International Olympic Committee leaders are finally ready to reallocate the individual medals stripped from Jones for doping, but they plan to withhold the 100-metre gold from another drugtainted athlete, The Associated Press has learned.

Nine years after the 2000 Games, the International Olympic Committee is set to redistribute some of the five medals — three gold and two bronze — that Jones won in Sydney with the aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

At a two-day meeting starting tomorrow in Lausanne, Switzerland, the IOC executive board will decide to hand out Jones’ gold in the 200 metres and bronze in the long jump, but not give disgraced Greek sprinter Thanou the 100-metre gold, officials with direct knowledge of the plans told the AP yesterday.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision hasn’t been announced yet.

While Davis-Thompson of the Bahamas is to be upgraded from silver to gold in the 200 metres, the IOC will not reward Thanou in the 100 metres because she was at the centre of another drug scandal at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Thanou and fellow Greek runner Kostas Kenteris missed drug tests on the eve of the opening ceremony, claimed they were injured in a motorcycle crash and were hospitalised. They were forced to pull out of the games and were later banned for two years by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

Thanou and Kenteris — the men’s 200-metre winner in Sydney — are still awaiting trial in Greece on misdemeanour charges of staging the motorcycle crash to avoid the drug tests.

Although Thanou never tested positive and has not been linked to doping in Sydney, the IOC can deny her the gold medal based on her behaviour in Athens, the officials told the AP.

The IOC barred Thanou from last year’s Beijing Games, saying her drug-testing case in Athens was a “scandalous saga” that brought the Olympics into disrepute.

The prospect of Thanou being promoted to the gold medal has vexed IOC leaders ever since Jones admitted in 2007 that she used steroids at the time of the Sydney Games. Jones, who had been the first female athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics, served a six-month prison sentence last year for lying about doping and her role in a checkfraud scam.

The IOC stripped Jones of her five medals, which also included gold in the 4×400 relay and bronze in the 4×100 relay, in December 2007. But the committee has held off redistributing the medals pending legal issues and further developments in the BALCO steroid probe.

While the IAAF is in charge of amending the official results and rankings, the IOC has jurisdiction over the medals.

“I cannot know what the outcome of the discussion will be, but not all cases need necessarily to have the same treatment or the same result,” IOC executive board member Denis Oswald said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Thanou’s lawyers have indicated she could sue or appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to get the medal. In order to make a law suit more difficult, the IOC is not expected to make a formal announcement that it is denying Thanou the gold, but simply say that no decision was made to reallocate the medal.

“On an image issue, I would prefer to err on the side of not giving the medal and let her sue,” said Dick Pound, a Canadian IOC member and former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency who is not on the decision-making executive board. “If a CAS panel thinks that she’s legally entitled to it, then let them take the heat.”

The IAAF urged the IOC in August to speed up the process for reassigning Jones’ medals.

“The IAAF position is clear ˜ we are waiting for the decision of the IOC on this matter, and hope that it can be concluded as soon as possible,” IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said in an e-mail yesterday.