Victor Conte, centerpiece of the infamous BALCO scandal who eventually became the lead nutritionist for some of boxing’s biggest fighters, died earlier today from pancreatic cancer at the age of 75.
Conte’s
Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative became synonymous with the performance-enhancing drug scandals of the late 90s and early 2000s, distributing difficult-to-detect steroid cocktails to top Major League Baseball players and track-and-field athletes until a 2003 office raid from the FBI kicked off a multi-year saga of legal proceedings .
After pleading guilty to “steroid distribution and money laundering” in 2005, however, Conte founded Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning (SNAC) and reinvented himself as a sort of white hat nutrition specialist. He would spend the next decade and a half partnering with the likes of Andre Ward, Andre Berto, Nonito Donaire, Mikey Garcia, Gennadiy Golovkin, and Demetrius Andrade while advising drug-testing organizations and periodically offering insights about PED controversies in the sweet science.
Conte’s expertise in fooling drug tests makes it impossible to know one way or the other if he truly went clean for the last stretch of his career, but if he did in fact use his powers for good after serving his sentence, I commend him for it.
