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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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2 0 - 1 2 - 2 0 0 4 Who is Victor Conte?
By Sean Webby
Victor Conte Jr. wasn't so sure about this latest steroid formula, so he downed a dose of the clear liquid. Within minutes he was walking around his Balco lab in a stupor. He eventually found himself in another room, unsure of how he got there.
Being a guinea pig was part of his job, Conte now says. After taking the substance, Conte knew he could not risk giving it to his athlete clients because it could leave them impaired.
``I'm no . . . Dr. Frankenstein,'' Conte told the Mercury News in a rare interview.
But working from his now-infamous laboratory in Burlingame, Conte has given life to the monster that is the world's largest sports doping scandal. How the public perceives baseball, the Olympics, and many of their superstars hangs in the balance.
How did a man whose own athletic career peaked with some high school trophies garner this kind of influence over the lives of slugger Barry Bonds and track diva Marion Jones? Why would so many elite athletes put their health and reputations -- both priceless -- in the care of a middle-aged college dropout with a homemade talent for bass guitar and biochemistry?
Why would Conte, under indictment on charges he distributed steroids to athletes, admit as much in a nationally televised interview that, last week, triggered a $25 million defamation lawsuit by Jones? What makes Victor Conte tick?
``I'm not a . . . nut-case,'' he said. ``I made a decision that I could not get a fair trial. I would do it for the right reasons. Yes, it's ugly. Yes, it will make a lot of people mad at me and be damaging to people. I just felt the `seed of equivalent benefit' '' -- the silver lining -- ``is to present to the best of my ability the truth to the world.''
In more than a dozen interviews with his friends and foes, as well as others, Conte emerges as a man with a complex and contradictory personality -- part Dale Carnegie, part mad scientist, part flaxseed-oil salesman.
``He is a very intelligent, motivational person who can use that to convince you,'' said Bob Rush, a retired track coach for the College of San Mateo, who Conte said is a Balco stockholder. ``That's the problem.''
Conte does little to discourage these ambiguities. In his interview with the ABC news program ``20/20,'' Conte said he had no shame about giving steroids to athletes. Yet a few days later, he told the Mercury News: ``I feel accountable, responsible. It's all my fault. I guided them. I feel awful.'' Later he said that although he had made mistakes, he was ``not going to hide.''
``Genius is bold,'' he said.
Does Conte consider himself a genius? ``I consider myself somebody who makes greater use of their tools than most.''
While Conte has aggressively fought his indictments, he seems to enjoy the spotlight. In June, his attorney wrote a letter in which Conte offered to help rid the Olympics of drug cheats in exchange for a plea bargain, and the letter found its way to the White House. It didn't work.
Earlier this month, Conte's lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss the charges against his client because of leaks to the media; the same day, ABC was airing promos for his ``20/20'' interview.
These apparent contradictions are magnified by a style that Dr. Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist who has written a book on East German sports doping, labeled as ``megalomania.'' Ungerleider said he was struck by Conte's ``holier than thou,'' ``arrogant'' attitude during his TV interview.
``I think that shows a massive denial that he's using terrible ethics and engaging in illegal behavior,'' Ungerleider said. He went on that Conte's demeanor reminded him of the East German sports doctors. ``Everybody else is cheating, so why not us? And by the way, we are the smartest people on the face of the earth.'' ``The greed here was not money,'' the doctor said. ``It was the glory.''
Conte said he is misunderstood. ``A lot of people think I must be Satan or an evil-doer, John Gotti reincarnated,'' he said. ``That's not me. God is with me every day and I listen to the inner voice. I don't question it.''
Conte, 54, is in shape for his age, and it seems as important to him to show this as it would be for a dentist to flash a gleaming smile. He said he can bench press more than 300 pounds.
His nutritional supplement ZMA brings him about $2 million a year in gross revenues, he said. But Balco is laden with debt and may soon go out of business; he has filed for bankruptcy. ``Thanks to the feds,'' he wrote in an e-mail.
To court, Conte wears $2,000 Italian suits, from a men's store in Sausalito, that tightly hug his arms and chest. He peers intently over designer glasses.
Many who know him said Conte could seemingly cast a spell with his words. Ken McDaniel, a track coach at Cal State-Fullerton who relies on Conte for motivational advice, said that at a meet in 2001 at Stanford, he asked for some advice about nutrition. ``Ten minutes after talking to Victor, I felt like I could run through a wall,'' McDaniel said.
Growing up in the Central Valley, Conte was supposed to build the walls. His father, Victor Sr., was a construction foreman, as were four of his uncles. The Contes were blue-collar men who spent their days working hard and their weekends at self-built homes on Shaver Lake, fishing and drinking Hamm's.
But instead of jackhammers, Little Vic and his cousin Bruce Conte picked up Fender Stratocaster guitars. They were naturals. Around the fifth grade Little Vic realized, to his delight, that he was a natural athlete, too. He swept his Fresno school's mini-Olympics.
But he never could impress his dad, he said. He remembers doing a day of hard yardwork and pointing it out to Big Vic. ``Hey Dad, I mowed the lawn!'' His father replied: ``Who is supposed to do it, me?'' That reaction seems to haunt Conte, still.
``I didn't get a lot of credit from my parents,'' he said ruefully several times during an interview.
Conte and his cousin started playing music at school dances and family functions as kids, and eventually joined a succession of bands as teenagers.
After high school, Conte enrolled at Fresno City College. He was a finance major, and his parents thought he would make a good accountant, Conte said. He got A's for three semesters. But a music gig in Los Angeles that paid $1,000 for two nights seemed to foretell a better financial future than doing other people's taxes. He dropped out.
Within months Conte was recording with a band whose name might also have held a clue to his future: the Pure Food and Drug Act. Then, in 1977, Conte joined Bruce in the band Tower of Power, playing the bass and winning over its members with a blistering rendition of their song ``What is Hip?'' and earning the nickname ``Walkin' Fish'' for the way he shuffled around the stage during solos.
Conte's tenure with the band marks him as a minor celebrity. But he and Bruce were fired the following year. Conte started his own band, Jump Street, and later played with Herbie Hancock.
His dad had always said: ``My son's a musician. He never worked a day in his life.'' But playing music professionally, with a fancy car and his own house with a view, Little Vic was beginning to prove his dad wrong.
Balco began as a law-abiding operation in the early 1980s, when Conte grew tired of the road and moved to the Bay Area. (Several coaches said they used Balco's blood-testing lab to find out whether their athletes were taking banned drugs.)
Conte invested in a medical clinic and there saw the future in a plasma spectrometer -- a blood-testing device -- bought from a bankrupt business. He would use it to help athletes identify mineral deficiencies in their blood.
To learn the field, Conte searched medical databases and read about trace element metabolism at Stanford's medical library. One of his first big clients was Karl Mohr, then a swimming coach at UC-Berkeley.
``He was this neat, remarkable guy on the cutting edge,'' Mohr said. ``There wasn't much to be uncomfortable with.'' Mohr had himself tested, and later he brought his star swimmer -- future Olympian Matt Biondi -- and the rest of the team. Even so, Mohr was never sure it worked, and he did not come back.
But enough people believed in what Conte was doing that soon he was working with the NFL's Denver Broncos and Miami Dolphins, as well as Olympic judo and track athletes. Most of the coaches from that time said in interviews that they were impressed with Conte's knowledge, despite his lack of formal training.
Willy Cahill said Conte could predict from test results which of his U.S. Olympic judo athletes would succeed. Jim Walsh, then an assistant coach with the Stanford football team after a stint in the NFL, said Conte seemed like the real thing when he met him in the late 1980s.
``It was a big leap of faith to go from bass player to scientist,'' Walsh said. ``He wanted to set the world on fire with his ingenuity. And at the time, I said to myself: For the first time, here is someone who is testing someone for the right reasons.'' Conte lost that vision, Walsh said, when he began chasing fortune and fame. ``He is enamored with publicity.''
One former colleague said bluntly that Conte is a fraud. Ladislav Pataki, a scientist and former track athlete who now runs a lab in Los Gatos, said he helped start Balco. But Conte, he said, cut him out.
``He just knows the big words,'' Pataki said. ``You have an actor that speaks in a knowledgeable way about something. Conte acts like a scientist. It's a great act.'' Pataki said he was angry when they parted ways in 1988. He's not angry anymore. ``I was laughing about how good it was that I am not with him, that I was not dragged into it.''
Conte said Pataki was simply jealous. In an e-mail, he wrote: ``It is amazing how people try to take credit for success.''
Conte began to distribute steroids in the late 1990s, he has said. By then he was working with a stable of elite athletes and making money off his nutritional supplement ZMA. Soon he realized that to produce success at the highest levels, he had to facilitate cheating.
``I approached it like any other business plan,'' Conte said. He studied successful track clubs. ``Almost at once I realized `Wow! These people aren't that smart. They are cheating. To beat them you have to cheat, too.' Hey, if the athletes are going to compete they have no choice. . . . But with me, it will be effective and safe.'' Gregory Tafralis, a former shot put champion, said his friend thought he was protecting the athletes. ``He was making sure they didn't freakin' die.''
And some say Conte may have been star-struck. Conte's relationship with Jones, the Olympic track champion, was perhaps his biggest brush with popularity, greatness and, now, controversy.
Jones denies Conte's accusation in his television interview that she took performance-enhancing drugs. His statements, she said, were inspired by a grudge that began when she resisted promoting ZMA. Jim Schmaltz, an editor with Flex magazine, recalled a track meet in 2001 where he and Conte watched Jones race. Conte, he said, was ``glowing about her talent. He was definitely proud to have a part in her success.''
A vestige of their old relationship -- whatever it was -- remains in one of Conte's closest friendships, with Jones' former husband, C.J. Hunter.
Hunter, once a world champion shot-putter and later a strength coach at North Carolina State University, sells mortgages now and lives with his family near Raleigh. The two met at a news conference at the 2000 Olympics, in Sydney, where Conte took center stage to explain that he believed contaminated supplements had caused Hunter to test positive for steroids. They now speak by phone twice a week. ``Unfortunately, in the last couple years all we have been able to talk about is all this stuff,'' Hunter said.
Asked to describe his friend in a word, Hunter said: ``Complex.'' ``Victor loves himself. Victor loves to promote himself. But he's a nice guy. He's never lied to me. Not once.''
Conte wolfs down motivational books: ``The Luck Factor,'' ``The Power of Intention.'' He wrote in an e-mail that he often ponders his fate while sitting on a bench in the backyard of his $1.5 million Tudor home in San Mateo.
``Thoughts become things'' is one of Conte's favorite aphorisms. The saying comes from Ernest Holmes, the founder of the United Church of Religious Science. Followers believe in personal responsibility and that positive thought allows people to control what happens in their lives.
Another of Conte's favorite books is ``Think and Grow Rich'' by the late motivational guru Napoleon Hill. Hill wrote: ``Every adversity, every failure and every heartache brings with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit.''
It's all connected to what Conte taught his children and his athletes: If you think positive thoughts, positive things will happen.
What is the equivalent benefit here, in the face of prison, a $25 million lawsuit and scandal?
Conte chuckled. ``The game is not over yet,'' he said.
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