🔗 Share this article Victor Conte, Key Figure in Notorious Sports Performance-Enhancing Drug Controversy, Dies at 75. The man behind the scheme, who devised a operation to supply hard-to-detect banned substances to elite sports stars featuring MLB legends Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and track and field star Marion Jones decades ago, has died. His age was 75. Government Probe and Criminal Cases An official inquiry regarding another company set up by him, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), led to the guilty verdicts of Jones, competitive biker Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Stubblefield, as well as trainers, suppliers, chemists, attorneys, and coaches. Conte's Admissions and Prison Time The Balco founder, who spent a third of a year in a penitentiary for illegal drug sales, talked publicly about his high-profile athletes. He was featured on television to state he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Marion Jones inject herself with HGH, but always refrained from implicating Bonds, the baseball star. The Mitchell Report The federal case resulted in the volume titled Game of Shadows. A week after the publication date in the mid-2000s, the sport's chief Selig hired former senate majority leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids. Conte stated he distributed steroids referred to as “the cream” and “the clear” and coached on their usage to many elite athletes, like Giambi, a star player, according to the report. “The illegal use of performance-enhancing substances is a significant danger to the fairness of the game,” the findings emphasized. “Broad usage by competitors of these drugs puts at a disadvantage the clean players who decline to take them and raises questions about the accuracy of historical stats.” The report noted the challenges took time to emerge. Mitchell claimed all parties in the sport in the previous twenty years – including leaders, team executives, the representative body and players – shared some responsibility for what he called the PED epoch. Investigation Origins The official probe into the laboratory was initiated by a revenue officer digging through the corporate garbage. The defendant eventually confessed to a couple of the 42 charges filed against him in the mid-2000s before a trial. Half a dozen of the 11 convicted people were caught misleading grand jurors. Further Legal Actions The athlete's coach Greg Anderson, admitted guilt to steroid distribution charges stemming from his involvement with Balco. The court gave him to 90 days in incarceration and the same duration of house arrest. Bonds' Legal Battles Bonds was charged with deceiving a grand jury about using performance-enhancing drugs and went on trial in the early 2010s. The government abandoned the charges down the line when the government decided not to contest an overturned ruling to the supreme court. A decorated player and frequent All-Star, he ended his career after the 2007 campaign with 762 home runs, surpassing the record of 755 that Aaron established from his career. The athlete refuted knowingly using banned substances but has not been voted to the sport's hall of honor. After Incarceration The former convict told the Associated Press in a past conversation that “sportspeople break rules to succeed, but the government agents and prosecutors cheat to win, too.” He also questioned whether the outcomes in such proceedings justified the effort. Following his prison term, Conte got back in business in the late 2000s by resuscitating a nutritional supplements business he had launched two decades earlier called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He operated in the very same place that previously contained the original company in Burlingame, California. Unapologetic Views The controversial figure remained defiant about his key part in doling out tailored drugs to elite athletes. He claimed he simply helped “balance the odds” in a world already rife with cheaters. Outside Views To a WADA member, a then-member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte could be compared to selling cocaine or heroin. “It concerns totally illegal drug trafficking. This refers to substance use in defiance of legal codes,” Wadler said in the past. “This is not philanthropy and it's not altruistic. It's trafficking.”