By BERNARD FERNANDEZ, PhillyNews.com
WHEN IT COMES to performance-enhancing drugs, a central figure in a scandal-plagued era contends the real villains are sports fans who want to believe in the concept of all-natural heroes, but maybe not so much as to demand rigid testing procedures that would provide more hard evidence as to whether their favorite football or baseball player is dirty.
As the founder and president of Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), Victor Conte is an ex-con widely regarded as the serpent who offered all those world-class athletes a tempting apple enriched with anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, erythropoietin (EPO) and designer drugs that came to be known as "the clear" and "the cream." His clients included disgraced Olympian Marion Jones, champion boxer Shane Mosley and San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, he of the literally swollen head and cartoonishly inflated biceps.
Now, he wants to help remove performance-enhancing drugs from sports, Conte says in an interview with the Daily News. He knows it is not going to happen easily.
"Until those who make the majority of the financial gains from sports develop a genuine interest in reducing the use of PEDs, it will continue," said Conte, who served a 4-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute steroids and money laundering in 2005.
Like many Americans who get their daily episodes of sweaty soap opera on ESPN, Conte watched with interest recently when Mark McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals' new hitting coach who never tested positive for PEDs, yet has been convicted in the court of public opinion, tearfully owned up to his steroid-soaked past. "Looking back," he said in a statement, "I wish I had never played in the steroid era," adding that it's time to "move on from this. Baseball is great now."
A few days after he confessed to what most people already suspected, McGwire was greeted by thunderous applause from a ballroom packed with 2,500 red-clad Cardinals fans whose sense of outrage apparently extends only to ballplayers wearing another team's colors.
Conte, however, sounds a warning that there is still too much money to be made, too much attention to be grabbed and detection too easy to avoid for druggies to turn over a completely new leaf. Whenever someone invents a better mousetrap for testing, smarter rodents are sure to come up with a more foolproof method for snatching the cheese and getting away with it.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game, and the mice usually find a way to stay a step ahead of the cat," Conte said. "Anyone who believes [McGwire] is naive. The use of performance-enhancing drugs is still rampant. Baseball and football have testing programs, but they're inept. Boxing's program is completely worthless."
As proof that the average fan talks a better anti-drug game than he's willing to play, Conte cites a poll of track and field fans in Europe, where sprinters and shotputters are much bigger stars, at least between Olympics, than they are in the United States. Asked whether they would rather see a certifiably clean 100-meter dash guy clocked in 10.2 seconds, or a steroid-fueled one break the world record (the current mark is 9.58 seconds), a majority of respondents gritted their teeth, fessed up and admitted they would rather see the faster guy on PEDs.
With testing programs that cast limited nets and catch an occasional fish but let many whoppers escape, Conte thinks the get-tough posturing in most sports is mostly for show. Cheaters will continue to cheat, but more carefully, Conte says, while those charged with the responsibility of flushing them out go only part of the way to fix the problem.
"I said on ABC's '20/20' that I believed 50 percent of baseball players were on steroids and 80 percent were using stimulants [at a time when aging superstars Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens and others were defying the natural laws of diminishing returns]," Conte said. "Maybe it's a little less now, but a reduction is not the same as elimination."
To buttress that argument, Conte notes that an 2008 agreement between the players union and Major League Baseball allows offseason testing of up to 375 players over a 3-year period, or roughly 31 percent of those on teams' 40-man rosters. Previously, only 60 players were tested in the offseason. All major league players are randomly selected for steroid testing twice during the regular season.
Conte realizes he forever will be a pariah to many, but he insists he's now on the side of good and virtue. He says he's available to pass along his expertise to those truly committed to ridding sports of PEDs.
The response thus far has been, frankly, underwhelming.
Conte, who was sued for defamation by Shane Mosley, was alerted by a New York Daily News article that reported the World Boxing Council was conducting an investigation into Mosley's use of PEDs. Conte says he contacted WBC attorney Robert Lenhardt, who was involved in the probe.
"I sent him e-mails and documents," Conte said. "All I got back from him was an acknowledgment, 'We're in receipt of this information. Thanks.' It became apparent pretty soon he had no interest in following up."
Lenhardt responed to Conte's claims in an interview with the Daily News. "The WBC believes it is one of the early leaders in all of sports in putting in anti-doping regulations," Lenhardt said.
"Did Mr. Conte send information to the WBC? I can confirm that he did. But the WBC recognizes that these matters [Mosley's defamation suit against Conte] are currently being litigated in the U.S. court system, so there has been no determination [of their validity or usefulness] in advance of the outcome."
Conte also claims to have met with other anti-doping organizations.
"I also met with officials of USADA [United States Anti-Doping Agency] face-to-face. I reached out and wrote an open letter to WADA [World Anti-Doping Agency]. I flew to New York and met with Dick Pound [president of WADA].
"But the new regime at WADA, headed by Australia's John Fahey, don't want to listen to me because I'm a bad guy. Fahey said he'd rather get his information from medical doctors than from a convicted felon."
Typical of what some could say is a "don't-call-us, we'll-call-you" attitude toward Conte by the anti-doping establishment is this response by Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of USADA, who said: "For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would associate with someone like this who's made so many mistakes in the past."
Conte also offered his services to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which sanctioned the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. megafight scheduled for March 13 that fell apart over a drug-testing dispute. He was told thanks, but no thanks.
Keith Kizer, executive director of the NSAC - which requires urine testing, but not blood testing - said he is confident his state's policy is comprehensive enough to get the job done.
"I'm very pleased with it," he said. "We actually had some experts from the U.S. Olympic Committee and USADA come here 8 or 9 months ago to talk about our drug-testing policy. They didn't have a problem with it at all. Certainly nothing about blood testing came up.
"I hope you'll forgive me if I don't put a lot of stock into what Victor Conte has to say. The NSAC is known not just for drug-testing, but for being very proactive in all aspects of regulation. Almost 2 years ago we instituted out-of-competition drug-testing, to be even better at detection. Keep in mind, though, that our ultimate goal is not to catch people; it's to keep them from using in the first place."
Conte said such satisfaction on Kizer's part is indicative of boxing's status as the "wild, wild West" of PEDs, an outlaw hole-in-the-wall enclave where only the dumbest and least discreet violators ever are brought to justice.
"I believe there's widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in boxing, and there has been for decades," Conte said.
"If they were really interested in cleaning it up, the first step would be to establish a protocol where inspectors begin to test fighters up to 2 months before a bout. Blood and urine testing would be done randomly."
But what about Pacquiao's aversion to "invasive" testing standards demanded by Mayweather (who also would have submitted himself to them) that have never previously been instituted in boxing?
"For psychological reasons, some athletes are going to complain about having blood drawn," Conte said. "They don't like needles. But to take a very small blood sample would have an extremely minimal to no effect physically.
"I think you could do blood testing up to 5 days prior to a fight with no physical detriment to a participant. Even 10 days would be OK. But as soon as you go to 14 days or longer, that's enough time to use EPO and build up your red blood cell count. At 24 days, there's all sorts of things that can be done with thyroid medication, fast-acting forms of insulin, EPO, testosterone."
Conte said it is "suspicious," the way Pacquiao, 31, has gained lean muscle mass while retaining and even seemingly improving his power and speed while bulking up from 106 pounds to 147. Pacquiao is not known to have ever failed a drug test.
"But it's difficult to make any kind of allegations against him because the drug tests he's had to take are worthless," said Conte, who pointed out that Marion Jones tested negative 160 consecutive times until she admitted to using PEDs, rather than risk more substantial jail time, while under oath and testifying before a grand jury. Jones subsequently was stripped of her five Olympic medals from 2000 by the International Olympic Committee.
But isn't the fact that Jones, McGwire and others were exposed, by whatever means, proof that a legitimate attempt is being made to purify the games people play?
"It's nothing more than propaganda," Conte said. "They want to be able to say, 'Hey, we test. We're trying.' " *
Source: philly.com
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