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Victor Conte, who engineered a system to provide hard-to-detect performance-enhancing drugs to elite sports stars featuring baseball icons Giambi and Bonds and sprinting gold medalist Marion Jones in the past, is deceased. His age was 75.

Federal Investigation and Criminal Cases

An official inquiry regarding an additional venture set up by him, Balco, led to the guilty verdicts of Jones, top track cyclist Thomas, and ex-pro football defender Dana Stubblefield, along with various support personnel and professionals.

Public Statements and Legal Consequences

The Balco founder, who spent four months in federal prison for illegal drug sales, discussed frankly about his high-profile athletes. He appeared on broadcast media to state he had seen triple Olympic champion Jones inject herself with human growth hormones, but consistently avoided incriminating Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.

Sport's Official Review

The federal case inspired the volume Game of Shadows. Just days following the book's publication in 2006, MLB commissioner Bud Selig brought on political figure George Mitchell to investigate steroids.

He revealed he distributed steroids known as two specific substances and advised on their application to numerous elite athletes, such as Jason Giambi, a star player, as per the investigation.

Using performance-enhancing substances is a significant danger to the fairness of the sport,” the Mitchell report concluded. “Broad usage by competitors of these drugs puts at a disadvantage the those who refuse to cheat who decline to take them and leads to skepticism about the accuracy of historical stats.”

It was stated the issues were not sudden. The report emphasized everyone involved in the sport in the prior two decades – including commissioners, management, the players’ association and players – shared some responsibility for what he termed “the steroids era”.

How It Began

The official probe into the laboratory started when a revenue officer digging through the business refuse. He ended up pleading guilty to a couple of the 42 charges filed against him in that year before a trial. Six of the defendants sentenced were caught lying to grand jurors.

Related Cases

The athlete's coach Greg Anderson, admitted guilt to drug dealing counts arising from his involvement with Balco. Anderson was sentenced to 90 days in incarceration and an equal period of home confinement.

Bonds' Legal Battles

The baseball legend was accused of providing false statements to a investigative body about obtaining banned substances and faced a trial in 2011. The government abandoned the charges four years later when the government decided not to appeal an reversed conviction to the highest court.

A decorated player and frequent All-Star, he ended his career after the 2007 campaign with a record home run tally, breaking the mark of Aaron's total that Hank Aaron established from his career. Bonds denied knowingly using PEDs but has failed to gain entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Conte's Post-Prison Life

Conte stated in an interview in a 2010 interview that “competitors do cheat to triumph, but the officials and lawyers also bend the rules.” He wondered whether the results in such proceedings merited the work.

After serving his sentence, Conte returned to work in that year by rebooting a health products venture he had founded years before called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He set up shop in the same building that previously contained Balco in Burlingame.

Continued Justification

Conte continued to justify about his major involvement in distributing tailored drugs to professional competitors. He maintained he simply helped “balance the odds” in a arena full of cheaters.

Outside Views

To Dr Gary Wadler, a at the time a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Conte could be compared to pushing illegal narcotics. “You are talking about blatant drug dealing. It's about using drugs in breach of national statutes,” Wadler said in that period. “This isn't charity and this is not some do-gooding. This is drug dealing.”