Victor Conte obit

Victor Conte, BALCO founder at center of steroid scandal, dies at 75

 He was not on the list.

Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.

Conte died Monday, SNAC System, a sports nutrition company he founded, said in a social media post. It did not disclose his cause of death.

The federal government's investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Conte, who served four months in federal prison for dealing steroids, talked openly about his famous former clients. He went on television to say he had seen three-time Olympic medalist Jones inject herself with human growth hormone, but always stopped short of implicating Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger.

The investigation led to the book "Game of Shadows." A week after the book was published in 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig hired former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to investigate steroids.

Conte said he sold steroids known as "the cream" and "the clear" and advised on their use to dozens of elite athletes, including Giambi, a five-time major league All-Star, the Mitchell report said.

In the aftermath, he also worked with organizations such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (VADA) to identify loopholes and bolster drug detection and founded SNAC Nutrition. SNAC, according to its website, professed to “pioneering the expansion of human potential by utilizing clinical science to drive athletic performance” since 1987. Rather than try to ignore his past, Conte leaned into it – and embraced the role as a reformed bad guy.

The fighters and boxers Conte worked with, which included Terence Crawford, Claressa Shields and Devin Haney – some of the world’s best – swore by him. And even after receiving his cancer diagnosis and facing chemotherapy treatments back in June, Conte was upbeat and focused on a big weekend of boxing featuring his fighters.

“To have seven fighters on huge platforms in the midst of fighting cancer … this is what I do,” Conte told BoxingScene.

“This is what I enjoy. I’m going to continue doing what I do.”

In the late 1970s, Conte played bass with funk / R&B group Tower of Power, appearing on the band's 1978 release We Came to Play!.