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Victor Conte, who engineered a system to provide stealthy performance-enhancing drugs to elite sports stars including baseball icons Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and sprinting gold medalist Jones decades ago, has died. His age was 75.

Federal Investigation and Criminal Cases

The federal government's probe of an additional venture Conte founded, Balco, culminated in the guilty verdicts of Jones, top track cyclist Tammy Thomas, and ex-pro football defender Stubblefield, in addition to coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Open Discussions and Legal Consequences

Conte, who served several months in federal prison for illegal drug sales, talked publicly about his famous former clients. He appeared on broadcast media to state he had witnessed triple Olympic champion Jones use a syringe with human growth hormones, but consistently avoided implicating Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.

The Mitchell Report

The federal case led to the volume titled Game of Shadows. Just days following the publication date in the mid-2000s, the sport's chief Bud Selig appointed political figure Mitchell to examine doping in baseball.

He revealed he provided steroids called “the cream” and “the clear” and advised on their application to many top performers, like Jason Giambi, a star player, the Mitchell report said.

Employing performance-enhancing substances poses a serious threat to the fairness of the competition,” the findings emphasized. “Broad usage by athletes of such substances puts at a disadvantage the honest athletes who decline to take them and raises questions about the validity of sporting achievements.”

Mitchell indicated the challenges took time to emerge. Mitchell claimed everyone involved in the sport in the prior two decades – encompassing leaders, club officials, the representative body and athletes themselves – were partly accountable for what he called the doping period.

Case Inception

The official probe into Balco started when a revenue officer digging through the company’s trash. Conte ultimately admitted guilt to two of the 42 charges against him in that year prior to court proceedings. Half a dozen of the defendants sentenced were ensnared for lying to grand jurors.

Related Cases

His fitness instructor Greg Anderson, confessed to illegal substance sales linked to his ties to the lab. He received a sentence to a quarter year in prison and three months of restricted movement.

Bonds' Legal Battles

Bonds was accused of providing false statements to a grand jury about obtaining performance-enhancing drugs and faced a trial in 2011. The government abandoned the charges after several years when the government decided not to contest an overturned ruling to the federal apex court.

A decorated player and 14-time All-Star outfielder, Bonds retired after the 2007 season with 762 homers, breaking the milestone of Aaron's total that Hank Aaron established from his career. Bonds denied intentionally taking banned substances but has not been voted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Later Years

He stated in an interview in a 2010 interview that “yes, athletes cheat to triumph, but the officials and lawyers cheat to win, too.” He wondered whether the outcomes in such legal cases were worth the resources.

Post-incarceration, he got back in business in 2007 by rebooting a nutritional supplements business he had started years before called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning or SNAC System. He located it in the same building that was home to his former lab in Burlingame, California.

Unapologetic Views

The controversial figure remained defiant about his central role in distributing custom PEDs to professional competitors. He claimed he simply helped “level the playing field” in a world full of rule-breakers.

Outside Views

To a WADA member, a former participant of the WADA, he could be compared to distributing cocaine or heroin. “It concerns totally illegal drug trafficking. It's about drug consumption in defiance of legal codes,” Wadler said in that period. “It's not a good deed and it's not altruistic. This is drug dealing.”