Victor Conte – The so-called 'Saddam Hussein of Sports’
In March 1984, Victor Conte founded the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), initially testing athletes for nutritional deficiencies.
By the 1990s, Conte had started developing Performance Enhancing Drugs, working with some of the biggest athletes in world sport.
According to wbur.org, Conte said: "I'm a guy that's called many bad names: Dr. Frankenstein, the Saddam Hussein of Sport."
According to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, Conte developed a banned steroid known as tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) with the help of bodybuilding chemist Patrick Arnold.
For the majority of his time at BALCO, Conte developed legal nutrition supplements, but by 2000, Conte was the man for PEDs in elite sports.
Conte developed an anabolic steroid called 'The Clear,' a watery substance that was dropped under an athlete's tongue to prevent hormone levels from changing, keeping them clear in drug tests.
For years before he was indicted and arrested for conspiracy to distribute steroids and money laundering, Conte helped stars Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, and allegedly Barry Bonds.
Conte had helped Jones to multiple Olympic Gold Medals, most notably at the 2000 Games, and helped Montgomery to a 100m world record in a team he formed called 'Project World Record.'
Conte sold his substances undetected until 2002 when the official federal investigation of BALCO began. USADA also started their investigation into the company around the same time.
In the summer of 2003, USADA investigators received a syringe with trace amounts of a mysterious substance. The anonymous tipster was Trevor Graham, Jones and Montgomery's coach.
The syringe went to Don Catlin, who had developed a testing process for THG. He tested 550 athletes, of which 20 had tested positive for using the substance, including Kelli White, Dwain Chambers, and Kevin Toth, who became incriminated in the investigation.
Conte knew he was on borrowed time, with 20 athletes found to have used his developed steroid. In December 2004, he participated in a groundbreaking interview that changed everything.
In an interview with ABC, Conte admitted to running a doping program, that had broken Olympic records, as well as implicating Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Kelli White, Dwain Chambers, and NFL player Bill Romanowski, including many more.
Federal prosecutors dropped 40 of the 42-count indictments after BALCO was thrust into the public consciousness as the face of performance-enhancing drugs.
In 2005, Conte pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute anabolic steroids and one count of money laundering, spending four months in prison and four months on house arrest.
Since his release from prison, Conte has started a new company called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning and helps boxers like Devin Haney to maximize their body's limits legally.