🔗 Share this article

Victor Conte, who devised a system to supply stealthy performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes such as baseball greats Giambi and Bonds and sprinting gold medalist Jones years back, is deceased. His age was 75.

Government Probe and Criminal Cases

A national inquiry regarding another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), led to the criminal findings of Marion Jones, competitive biker Thomas, and retired NFL player Dana Stubblefield, as well as trainers, suppliers, chemists, attorneys, and coaches.

Public Statements and Legal Consequences

Conte, who spent several months in a penitentiary for dealing steroids, spoke openly about his high-profile athletes. He was featured on TV to claim he had witnessed decorated Olympian Marion Jones inject herself with growth hormones, but consistently avoided implicating Bonds, the baseball star.

Sport's Official Review

This probe inspired the publication titled Game of Shadows. A week after the release of the book in that year, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig brought on political figure George Mitchell to look into PED use.

He admitted he distributed steroids referred to as two specific substances and coached on their application to many elite athletes, such as Giambi, a multiple-time All-Star, the Mitchell report said.

“The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the honesty of the game,” the Mitchell report concluded. “Broad usage by competitors of these compounds puts at a disadvantage the those who refuse to cheat who refuse to use them and leads to skepticism about the accuracy of sporting achievements.”

Mitchell indicated the challenges were not sudden. The report emphasized everyone involved in the sport in the prior two decades – including leaders, team executives, the players’ association and athletes themselves – bore partial blame for what he called the PED epoch.

How It Began

The federal investigation into the company started when a tax agent searching the corporate garbage. The defendant ended up pleading guilty to a pair of the numerous counts he faced in that year prior to court proceedings. Several of the individuals found guilty were ensnared for misleading grand jurors.

Further Legal Actions

Bonds’ personal trainer Greg Anderson, confessed to drug dealing counts linked to his involvement with Balco. Anderson was sentenced to a quarter year in prison and three months of restricted movement.

The Slugger's Case

The home run king was charged with providing false statements to a federal jury about obtaining PEDs and faced a trial in that year. The government abandoned the charges four years later when the government decided not to appeal an reversed conviction to the supreme court.

A decorated player and frequent All-Star, he retired after the that season with 762 homers, breaking the milestone of 755 that Aaron set from the 1950s to 1970s. Bonds denied intentionally taking PEDs but has not been voted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Later Years

He stated in an interview in a past conversation that “competitors do cheat to win, but the government agents and prosecutors engage in misconduct as well.” He wondered whether the outcomes in such proceedings were worth the resources.

After serving his sentence, he returned to work in 2007 by rebooting a nutritional supplements business he had started two decades earlier called his supplements brand. He set up shop in the same building that previously contained Balco in Burlingame, California.

Continued Justification

Conte continued to justify about his major involvement in providing custom PEDs to elite athletes. He claimed he simply helped “even the competition” in a world already rife with cheaters.

Outside Views

To an expert, a then-member of the WADA, he could be compared to pushing illegal narcotics. “It concerns blatant drug dealing. It's about substance use in breach of national statutes,” he stated in that period. “This isn't charity and it's not altruistic. This is drug dealing.”