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2 4 - 0 9 - 2 0 0 6 Conte muscles back
BALCO founder back in biz, erases bitter pill of BALCO
BY TERI THOMPSON and T.J. QUINN
SAN FRANCISCO - There are two bowling ball-sized holes in the ground where the "BALCO" sign used to be, the blue one with the white bridge that was in the background of every television camera shot about the steroid scandal for three years.
Victor Conte finally had to yank it from the ground.
BALCO as a company doesn't exist anymore. Now the noun has become an adjective and a verb, too. There are "BALCO athletes" in baseball, football and track; a review in an auto magazine said Land Rover had
"It's come full circle," Conte says the day before the reporters' hearing before a packed courtroom. Back problems cause him to walk a little stiffly and he has lost weight since the start of his saga. But he is dressed sharply in a lime green silk short-sleeve shirt, black jeans, black sandals. If he is ever worried about being recognized in public, it doesn't show. He has the same combed-back hair, the same rimless glasses, the same pencil-thin David Niven mustache, a Rolex with a two-tone metal band on his left wrist.
In the offices that used to be the focal point of the largest doping scandal in sports history, Conte has whitewashed the BALCO sign that hung above the front door, but he is still in business. Around the side of the building, tucked at the end of a strip mall, is another door with the address and four peel-off letters that spell "SNAC," the only indication of the business that is being run out of the modest space.
SNAC, Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, has long been Conte's other business, the company through which he sells the diet supplement ZMA. The perfectly legal zinc-zagnesium-vitamin B6 compound, popular with bodybuilders and other gym rats, sells about 100,000 units a month, he says, and continues to make Conte a wealthy man.
He uses the advertising engine Overture.com to help spread the word about ZMA. Anyone who Googles "Conte" or "BALCO" or "Bonds" or "Marion Jones" and finds an article about the scandal has probably seen the ads for SNAC or ZMA that run next to it.
"From day one I figured out how to turn this lemon into lemonade," he says.
While Conte, 56, spent his three months in prison, James Valente, the vice president of BALCO who also was convicted in the case, kept SNAC alive, and provided Conte with a way of paying his considerable legal bills - up to a half-million dollars, he says.
For the first time since Sept. 3, 2003, when IRS, FBI and San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force agents flooded the parking lot with black SUVs and stormed his office, Conte takes two reporters inside the notorious building.
His daughter, Veronica, small frame with impressive biceps, is filing papers in a cabinet, next to a box on the floor stuffed with FedEx packages. He leaves his office out of the tour. "It's a mess," he says.
Across a hallway is a room with several dozen boxes of ZMA, all bearing the SNAC label. Most of it is sold by other companies, like Twin Labs and Weider Nutrition, who buy 55-pound boxes of ZMA from Conte, then package and market it on their own. On every bottle, in small print, is either the name "SNAC" or "V. Conte."
Some of those companies stopped advertising when the BALCO scandal broke, worried about their association with a steroid dealer. And while sales might have dipped at the height of the scandal, "just as many people are buying ZMA today with no advertising," Conte says.
Somewhere there is a stigma about giving steroids to athletes and going to prison for it, but not in Conte's circles.
"I was the prison celebrity," he says. "I have people stop me in Home Depot and say, 'Dude! Can I have your autograph?' The girl in the checkout line in the grocery store said, 'You've got a lot of courage.'"
Plenty of people come to him for nutritional and conditioning help, he says. Whether he's an ex-convict or not, he helped create the fastest woman in the world in Jones, the fastest man in the world in Tim Montgomery, the greatest hitter in the world in Barry Bonds. The athletes may be tainted goods now, even if just by association, but people know Conte's recipes worked.
In the reception area of his offices there are three chairs where Conte says he, Valente and Valente's wife Joyce sat at gunpoint while agents ransacked the offices (the government disputes that). Across from those chairs, signed photos from Bonds, Jones, Michael Chang, Bill Romanowski and male and female body-builders hang on the walls. Above the chairs is a photo of Conte
The walls are freshly painted, and many are new. Conte sold some of his space, the part of the building where he used to have a gym, to the toy store next door. Now his portion is about half the size it once was. "We're renovating everything," he says.
Much of his conversation is off the record, but it is vintage Conte, breathless and relentless, eager to explain how he has done things with business and sports that no one else ever did.
Conte, a college dropout who is self-taught in chemistry and physiology, says his mission was not to create monsters, but to help athletes cheat safely and effectively, since they were going to do it anyway. He's tired of having people ask him who else got drugs from him, athletes who might not have been outed.
"From this point forward I have no interest in causing any damage to the athletes connected to BALCO," he says. They were doing what they needed to compete in sports that were hopelessly stained with drugs, that continue to be stained with drugs that easily avoid the world's best testing, he says. Causing damage to those athletes would also be bad for business. Besides, he says, he sees something hypocritical in the way the world condemned him and his athletes.
"People need to look at themselves in the mirror and in the medicine cabinet," he says. "They get boob jobs, nose jobs, butt jobs; they increase their performance between the sheets with Viagra, the top-selling drug in the world. We're a performance-enhancing society. [Meer: The Doping Of Everyday Life door John Hoberman] There's been too much hate. It's time for a change. It's time to put the spotlight on Olympic body officials and the owners and the players' union officials who allowed this system to develop."
Conte is trying to keep a low profile, as much as he can help himself. He still communicates through E-mail with a handful of reporters around the country, but for the most part he avoids interviews and only issues public statements on issues that his lawyers have screened.
He's worried his lawyers will yell at him for the interview he is conducting now. He won't disappear, though. He plans to point out the idiocy and hypocrisy he says he sees in the sports world when it comes to performance-enhancers.
Conte has no sympathy for Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the co-authors of "Game of Shadows" who might end up spending more time in prison than all the BALCO defendants combined, although he says he supports a reporter's right to protect sources. President Bush might have told the Chronicle reporters they had served the public, but Conte believes he is the one who can enlighten the world like no one else.
"I feel like I was the guy born for this job. And you know what that job is?" he asks. "To tell the truth."
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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
