Thought this was a very good insight into the world of cheating and that testosterone is the drug of choice...
____
Up and running once more . . . the man who allowed cheats to prosper
Victor Conte, the brains behind Balco, the Californian laboratory that was exposed as one of the most comprehensive doping operations in sports history, is out of prison, back in business and working with professional athletes again. In his first newspaper interview since his release from prison last year, Conte told The Times that he has a group of ten elite sports people whom he is advising and supplying as their specialist in nutritional supplements.
Conte is working from the same building in Burlingame where Balco – the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative – was based and is running a nutritional supplements business called SNAC (Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning). Life appears to be so much like before that occasionally he even posts a picture of Barry Bonds, the baseball player, on the homepage of the SNAC website. There is one essential difference now, Conte said. “All ten are clean. I will never even discuss doping with them. Never again. That is a past life for me.”
From the outside it appears astonishing that any athlete would risk association with Conte, even if he is going straight. But he, of course, tells it differently. “These ten I’m with – I’m talking people who have won medals at World Championships and other elite people who have won at the same level in other sports – it’s best for them and me to keep their names out of it,” he said. “I’m proud to still have the trust of a lot of people like this.”
Conte said that he will not dope any more, but that is not because he believes that doping is wrong. No, the reason he will not dope is because of the pain that the notoriety and the four-month prison sentence caused his family. He did not find it too bad. “Federal prison camp is like being on a cruise,” he said. “Only you can’t get off. They have Starbucks, the food is good. For me it was like vacation, for my family it was like hell.”
As one of the world’s greatest doping experts, though, he has knowledge that few are prepared to share – and his view of world sport and the prevalence of doping in athletics in particular is deeply alarming. “It’s very difficult to reach a final of a world [athletics] event clean,” he said. “The overwhelming majority haven’t.”
What percentage have cheated to get there? “Closer to 80 per cent than 60,” Conte said.
He cites a final from a recent world athletics event from which three of the eight competitors were subsequently implicated in doping. “There are two others in that event that I provided with performance-enhancing substances,” he said. “So I already know that five of the eight were on it.”
Overall, how prevalent is doping in athletics? “I believe that of the 10,000 athletes that competed in Sydney [in the 2000 Olympics], at least half of them had used some sort of performance-enhancing substances,” Conte said. “They have linked 15 people to me. My question is, where did the other 4,985 people get their stuff?”
The way he tells it, you half-expect that he knows the answer.
Running a successful doping operation, he said, “was about much more than developing drugs and methods. It was a network of people; to win any war, you need intelligence. I had access to information from people that were inside the labs. I would find out what they were doing in terms of testing designer steroids.
“I know of an accredited lab in Europe that had an employee who was coming in at night and doing prescreening of urine samples for athletes – to help these athletes beat tests and monitor clearing times. What I’m saying is, it’s not about the drugs, it’s about knowing who’s doing what, when and where.”
This intelligence network broke down when his athletes simply got too good. “This whole Balco thing [its downfall] was about athletes that had worked with me before, went to another camp, told them exactly what we were doing and then dropped Kelli White [a former client] in it,” he said. “Otherwise Kelli would never have tested for Modafinil [after the women’s 100 metres final of the 2003 World Championships in Paris].
“It was a complete inside job. Believe me, the doping officials would never have figured that out themselves. This was like East-West Coast gang warfare where they did a drive-by shooting. They realised that they couldn’t compete on the track and the only way for them to win was to turn me in.”
It is established fact that Trevor Graham, the former coach of Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the United States sprinters, sent to the authorities a syringe of Conte’s “magic potion”, THG (tetrahy-drogestrinone). Conte said that this was only after his relationship with the three had ended in 2001. The next year, Montgomery broke the world 100 metres record.
“Montgomery had stockpiled the stuff he received from me, so he was able to walk away knowing he had the stuff and knew the protocol to use it for another year,” Conte said. “But having terminated my relationship with Trevor, Marion and Tim, a collusion developed and in 2002 they sent it to all the accredited laboratories. It then took them a year to develop the test.”
It was the rise of one of his new athletes, Dwain Chambers, the Briton, Conte said, that worried his former clients and they turned on him. “Dwain is a great guy who got caught up in something he shouldn’t have been in,” Conte said. “But he, like me, realised that this [doping] is what goes on, that these are the rules. He’s had tremendous damage done to his life because of it.”
But even when the whistle had been blown on Balco, according to Conte, he would have had every reason to have believed that it was not the end of the operation.
“I have direct knowledge from Olympic governing body officials from the US who have told me about a number of cover-ups of positive tests,” he said. “These are cover-ups of people who won gold medals for the US. Even some of the athletes I personally worked with – I would get calls from the officials and they would tell me, ‘Your boy tested positive.’ And a few days later I would get a call and they’d say, ‘We’ve decided to cover this up.’ ” Alarming as this all sounds, it works in Conte’s favour to tell it this way. “I’m one of the only guys telling the truth,” he said. But it works for him because it justifies everything that Balco was about. “It wasn’t me who created an unlevel playing field,” he said. “The ineptness of the antidoping programmes contribute to the use-or-lose mentality that athletes are almost forced into. Its rampant use makes it virtually impossible for an athlete not using performance-enhancing substances at the top level.
“For many years, my business was only supplements that were legal. But I learnt what the real rules were about and then I made a decision. I knew athletes were buying these substances in dark alleys, from the trunks of cars, behind gyms. They were going to do it with or without my help. I felt I could help them to do it in a more safe manner.
“My message is to the parents of the young athletes of the future: the use of performance enhancing drugs at the elite level is rampant. If you don’t want your son or daughter to take drugs, then you need to steer them in other directions. Because at some point, they’ll get to the level where they are told they have no choice but to use them.
“Am I saying that doping is right? No, I’m not. I’m just saying that’s the way it is.”
Part Two - Why doping is as easy as taking candy from a baby
In part two of his interview, Victor Conte, the Balco founder, reveals the secrets of the cheats and urges testers to raise their game
Even though he was eventually caught by the authorities, Victor Conte, the man behind Balco, the Californian laboratory that was exposed as one of the most comprehensive doping operations in sports history, insists that taking performance-enhancing drugs and beating the antidoping police are “as easy as taking candy from a baby”.
“They’re learning, they’re progressing,” he said of the antidoping authorities. “But in certain regards they are of the opinion that they are doing a better job than they really are.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) followed its executive committee convention in Montreal last weekend with a statement that it intends to intensify its work coordinating with customs, drugs and law enforcement agencies worldwide. This approach, Conte said, is the way forward for Wada. “Is it effective?” he said. “Without a doubt – because of the tools they have. These guys can wire-tap.”
This is clearly necessary when he reels off the drugs he claims are in use. “Do athletes use insulin? Yes, it’s undetectable,” Conte said. “Do athletes use thyroid medication? Yes they do, it’s undetectable. Do they use growth hormone? Yes, it’s undetectable. Do they use EPO [erythropoietin]? Yes they do, that test is extremely easy to beat.”
Most of what he said is true. A growth hormone test is being engineered and insulin can be detected, but it is extremely hard to test for.
That is why police operations, such as the one that broke Balco, are essential. However, Conte, who was imprisoned for four months after the California laboratory was exposed as a doping operation, said that it is wrong to assume that there is a prevalence of hi-tech operations such as Balco – he doubts that there are more than five – and also wrong that designer steroids, the likes of which Balco engineered, are rife. It is age-old testosterone that is the drug of choice.
“The use of designer drugs is significantly lower now because they [Wada] have changed the rules and now, if they find anything related in structure [to another illegal substance], even if they don’t know what it is, they can call it a positive test,” Conte said. “So now people are doing it with fast-acting testosterone. They can use, for example, testosterone undecanoate; a lot of athletes are doing it in Italy, it’s freely available in Mexico.
“You take these pills – typically 40 milligrams each – three or four times a day and you need to duck and dive for only a short time because they clear the system in four days. So you can do very intense weight training for just a couple of weeks and significantly enhance your explosive strength.”
This business of “ducking and diving” is where Conte believes the system is beatable. “I don’t consider in-competition testing to even be dope-testing,” he said. “I call that IQ-testing. If you are dumb enough to be caught in a competition, then you are mentally retarded. It’s during the off-season that athletes do their real weight training. That’s where the doping problem has always been.”
In the off-season, athletes have to provide “whereabouts” information and it is here, Conte said, that they play the system. “If you say you’re going to be training in Ohio, for instance, but you’re really in Florida and they [the drugs-testers] show up – and the odds are not very good of that – you get a ‘missed test’. The upside of that is you’ve also got a cycle of steroids under your belt. And you’re getting more steroids in on the other times when you are not being caught.
“But if you are caught a second time, you’ve got another missed test, but you’ve also had another cycle of steroids under your belt. The rule is three strikes and out. And it’s a moving timeframe of 18 months, so you show up at the World Championships or the Olympics, win a gold and soak up the endorsements until one of those missed tests drops off. Then you are in a position to duck and dive again because the consequence is nothing more than a missed test. That’s how athletes do it. The authorities say that they test more and do target-testing, but you can still duck and dive.”
How could the doping police do a better job? Conte insists that he has answered these questions. He has had three meetings with the US AntiDoping Agency and in February 2005 he spent three hours with an official from Wada. “And I didn’t do it in exchange for leniency,” he said. “I did it for the right reasons: to create a fully cooperative acknowledgement of the massive drug problem in elite sport.”
For the doping authorities to be more successful, he recommends better target-testing. “When you see that the fastest two men in the world are both from a track club in Los Angeles, for instance, or the Bay Area, or North Carolina or Jamaica – this should be worth looking at. What you need to do is take the dollars you have and the number of tests you have and focus your resources on the top ten in each event. Why test the top 100 – the people who are not winning races and not winning dollars? Why test everybody two times when you could test the top ten ten times?”
He also recommends better timing of the testing. “The testing used to drop off hugely in the fourth quarter of the year. But my point is, this is the off-season quarter when the athletes are using substances for their intensive weight training. Why did the testers decide to take a nap then?”
This is why, he said, Balco’s level of sophistication is not required to be a cheat. “I know of people who have very little information and are still able to get round the procedures. The authorities say they are improving – and they are. But is it still relatively easy for athletes to use drugs and beat the system? The answer is yes.”
____
Up and running once more . . . the man who allowed cheats to prosper
Victor Conte, the brains behind Balco, the Californian laboratory that was exposed as one of the most comprehensive doping operations in sports history, is out of prison, back in business and working with professional athletes again. In his first newspaper interview since his release from prison last year, Conte told The Times that he has a group of ten elite sports people whom he is advising and supplying as their specialist in nutritional supplements.
Conte is working from the same building in Burlingame where Balco – the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative – was based and is running a nutritional supplements business called SNAC (Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning). Life appears to be so much like before that occasionally he even posts a picture of Barry Bonds, the baseball player, on the homepage of the SNAC website. There is one essential difference now, Conte said. “All ten are clean. I will never even discuss doping with them. Never again. That is a past life for me.”
From the outside it appears astonishing that any athlete would risk association with Conte, even if he is going straight. But he, of course, tells it differently. “These ten I’m with – I’m talking people who have won medals at World Championships and other elite people who have won at the same level in other sports – it’s best for them and me to keep their names out of it,” he said. “I’m proud to still have the trust of a lot of people like this.”
Conte said that he will not dope any more, but that is not because he believes that doping is wrong. No, the reason he will not dope is because of the pain that the notoriety and the four-month prison sentence caused his family. He did not find it too bad. “Federal prison camp is like being on a cruise,” he said. “Only you can’t get off. They have Starbucks, the food is good. For me it was like vacation, for my family it was like hell.”
As one of the world’s greatest doping experts, though, he has knowledge that few are prepared to share – and his view of world sport and the prevalence of doping in athletics in particular is deeply alarming. “It’s very difficult to reach a final of a world [athletics] event clean,” he said. “The overwhelming majority haven’t.”
What percentage have cheated to get there? “Closer to 80 per cent than 60,” Conte said.
He cites a final from a recent world athletics event from which three of the eight competitors were subsequently implicated in doping. “There are two others in that event that I provided with performance-enhancing substances,” he said. “So I already know that five of the eight were on it.”
Overall, how prevalent is doping in athletics? “I believe that of the 10,000 athletes that competed in Sydney [in the 2000 Olympics], at least half of them had used some sort of performance-enhancing substances,” Conte said. “They have linked 15 people to me. My question is, where did the other 4,985 people get their stuff?”
The way he tells it, you half-expect that he knows the answer.
Running a successful doping operation, he said, “was about much more than developing drugs and methods. It was a network of people; to win any war, you need intelligence. I had access to information from people that were inside the labs. I would find out what they were doing in terms of testing designer steroids.
“I know of an accredited lab in Europe that had an employee who was coming in at night and doing prescreening of urine samples for athletes – to help these athletes beat tests and monitor clearing times. What I’m saying is, it’s not about the drugs, it’s about knowing who’s doing what, when and where.”
This intelligence network broke down when his athletes simply got too good. “This whole Balco thing [its downfall] was about athletes that had worked with me before, went to another camp, told them exactly what we were doing and then dropped Kelli White [a former client] in it,” he said. “Otherwise Kelli would never have tested for Modafinil [after the women’s 100 metres final of the 2003 World Championships in Paris].
“It was a complete inside job. Believe me, the doping officials would never have figured that out themselves. This was like East-West Coast gang warfare where they did a drive-by shooting. They realised that they couldn’t compete on the track and the only way for them to win was to turn me in.”
It is established fact that Trevor Graham, the former coach of Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the United States sprinters, sent to the authorities a syringe of Conte’s “magic potion”, THG (tetrahy-drogestrinone). Conte said that this was only after his relationship with the three had ended in 2001. The next year, Montgomery broke the world 100 metres record.
“Montgomery had stockpiled the stuff he received from me, so he was able to walk away knowing he had the stuff and knew the protocol to use it for another year,” Conte said. “But having terminated my relationship with Trevor, Marion and Tim, a collusion developed and in 2002 they sent it to all the accredited laboratories. It then took them a year to develop the test.”
It was the rise of one of his new athletes, Dwain Chambers, the Briton, Conte said, that worried his former clients and they turned on him. “Dwain is a great guy who got caught up in something he shouldn’t have been in,” Conte said. “But he, like me, realised that this [doping] is what goes on, that these are the rules. He’s had tremendous damage done to his life because of it.”
But even when the whistle had been blown on Balco, according to Conte, he would have had every reason to have believed that it was not the end of the operation.
“I have direct knowledge from Olympic governing body officials from the US who have told me about a number of cover-ups of positive tests,” he said. “These are cover-ups of people who won gold medals for the US. Even some of the athletes I personally worked with – I would get calls from the officials and they would tell me, ‘Your boy tested positive.’ And a few days later I would get a call and they’d say, ‘We’ve decided to cover this up.’ ” Alarming as this all sounds, it works in Conte’s favour to tell it this way. “I’m one of the only guys telling the truth,” he said. But it works for him because it justifies everything that Balco was about. “It wasn’t me who created an unlevel playing field,” he said. “The ineptness of the antidoping programmes contribute to the use-or-lose mentality that athletes are almost forced into. Its rampant use makes it virtually impossible for an athlete not using performance-enhancing substances at the top level.
“For many years, my business was only supplements that were legal. But I learnt what the real rules were about and then I made a decision. I knew athletes were buying these substances in dark alleys, from the trunks of cars, behind gyms. They were going to do it with or without my help. I felt I could help them to do it in a more safe manner.
“My message is to the parents of the young athletes of the future: the use of performance enhancing drugs at the elite level is rampant. If you don’t want your son or daughter to take drugs, then you need to steer them in other directions. Because at some point, they’ll get to the level where they are told they have no choice but to use them.
“Am I saying that doping is right? No, I’m not. I’m just saying that’s the way it is.”
Part Two - Why doping is as easy as taking candy from a baby
In part two of his interview, Victor Conte, the Balco founder, reveals the secrets of the cheats and urges testers to raise their game
Even though he was eventually caught by the authorities, Victor Conte, the man behind Balco, the Californian laboratory that was exposed as one of the most comprehensive doping operations in sports history, insists that taking performance-enhancing drugs and beating the antidoping police are “as easy as taking candy from a baby”.
“They’re learning, they’re progressing,” he said of the antidoping authorities. “But in certain regards they are of the opinion that they are doing a better job than they really are.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) followed its executive committee convention in Montreal last weekend with a statement that it intends to intensify its work coordinating with customs, drugs and law enforcement agencies worldwide. This approach, Conte said, is the way forward for Wada. “Is it effective?” he said. “Without a doubt – because of the tools they have. These guys can wire-tap.”
This is clearly necessary when he reels off the drugs he claims are in use. “Do athletes use insulin? Yes, it’s undetectable,” Conte said. “Do athletes use thyroid medication? Yes they do, it’s undetectable. Do they use growth hormone? Yes, it’s undetectable. Do they use EPO [erythropoietin]? Yes they do, that test is extremely easy to beat.”
Most of what he said is true. A growth hormone test is being engineered and insulin can be detected, but it is extremely hard to test for.
That is why police operations, such as the one that broke Balco, are essential. However, Conte, who was imprisoned for four months after the California laboratory was exposed as a doping operation, said that it is wrong to assume that there is a prevalence of hi-tech operations such as Balco – he doubts that there are more than five – and also wrong that designer steroids, the likes of which Balco engineered, are rife. It is age-old testosterone that is the drug of choice.
“The use of designer drugs is significantly lower now because they [Wada] have changed the rules and now, if they find anything related in structure [to another illegal substance], even if they don’t know what it is, they can call it a positive test,” Conte said. “So now people are doing it with fast-acting testosterone. They can use, for example, testosterone undecanoate; a lot of athletes are doing it in Italy, it’s freely available in Mexico.
“You take these pills – typically 40 milligrams each – three or four times a day and you need to duck and dive for only a short time because they clear the system in four days. So you can do very intense weight training for just a couple of weeks and significantly enhance your explosive strength.”
This business of “ducking and diving” is where Conte believes the system is beatable. “I don’t consider in-competition testing to even be dope-testing,” he said. “I call that IQ-testing. If you are dumb enough to be caught in a competition, then you are mentally retarded. It’s during the off-season that athletes do their real weight training. That’s where the doping problem has always been.”
In the off-season, athletes have to provide “whereabouts” information and it is here, Conte said, that they play the system. “If you say you’re going to be training in Ohio, for instance, but you’re really in Florida and they [the drugs-testers] show up – and the odds are not very good of that – you get a ‘missed test’. The upside of that is you’ve also got a cycle of steroids under your belt. And you’re getting more steroids in on the other times when you are not being caught.
“But if you are caught a second time, you’ve got another missed test, but you’ve also had another cycle of steroids under your belt. The rule is three strikes and out. And it’s a moving timeframe of 18 months, so you show up at the World Championships or the Olympics, win a gold and soak up the endorsements until one of those missed tests drops off. Then you are in a position to duck and dive again because the consequence is nothing more than a missed test. That’s how athletes do it. The authorities say that they test more and do target-testing, but you can still duck and dive.”
How could the doping police do a better job? Conte insists that he has answered these questions. He has had three meetings with the US AntiDoping Agency and in February 2005 he spent three hours with an official from Wada. “And I didn’t do it in exchange for leniency,” he said. “I did it for the right reasons: to create a fully cooperative acknowledgement of the massive drug problem in elite sport.”
For the doping authorities to be more successful, he recommends better target-testing. “When you see that the fastest two men in the world are both from a track club in Los Angeles, for instance, or the Bay Area, or North Carolina or Jamaica – this should be worth looking at. What you need to do is take the dollars you have and the number of tests you have and focus your resources on the top ten in each event. Why test the top 100 – the people who are not winning races and not winning dollars? Why test everybody two times when you could test the top ten ten times?”
He also recommends better timing of the testing. “The testing used to drop off hugely in the fourth quarter of the year. But my point is, this is the off-season quarter when the athletes are using substances for their intensive weight training. Why did the testers decide to take a nap then?”
This is why, he said, Balco’s level of sophistication is not required to be a cheat. “I know of people who have very little information and are still able to get round the procedures. The authorities say they are improving – and they are. But is it still relatively easy for athletes to use drugs and beat the system? The answer is yes.”
