Victor Conte On Boxing's 'Cloud of Suspicion' -- FanHouse

By Lem Satterfield, FanHouse

As the former BALCO founder, Victor Conte said that he spent four years "helping athletes to circumvent" Olympic style drug testing policies such as those executed by United States Anti-Doping Agency until 2003.

Now a self-proclaimed "part of the anti-doping movement," Conte, who turns 60 this month, presently runs SNAC -- an acronym for Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning -- which has been in existence since 1988 and supplies "perfectly legal sports nutrition products and supplements."

In this Youtube video, Conte, who is presently working with professional fighters, says that "there is a cloud of suspicion over the sport of boxing, and something needs to be done."

"My personal opinion is that it's [illegal drug use] rampant. Now you've got to understand that I spent four years on the dark side of this issue, and I've got a lot of contacts, and I know a lot of people, and I've got my ear to the ground," said Conte.

"So I hear all sorts of things, and not necessarily directly from the boxers themselves, but from people from the supply and distribution side of things," said Conte. "So I do believe that it's rampant, and that it will never be perfect. There are designer drugs out there, and there are some drugs that could possibly be used to circumvent the testing."

Conte said earlier on in the interview that is is not fair for boxing's focus solely to be upon fighters such as seven-division champion, Manny Pacquiao, whose career began as a 106-pounder but who has graduated, most recently, into the 147-pound class and maintained his "strength, power and speed" along the way.

"Is that suspicious? Of course it is. But he's not the only one," said Conte. "It's not fair to judge [Pacquiao] and then to not scruitinize Floyd Mayweather and many others who may have done similar things."

Source: boxing.fanhouse.com