Tag: BALCO

Shaking out prefight jitters with the Balco ringleader and his new boxer protégé.

(Photo: Michael Schwartz/PHOTOlink/Newscom)

Original Article: New York Magazine

By Geoffrey Gray

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The bus to the press conference is rumbling through midtown traffic two days before the fight. The trainers, sprint coach, and strength-and-conditioning coach are all piled in the back and cracking jokes. In the front, ­Victor Conte reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small plastic bag. It is filled with powder. He gives it to his fighter, Nonito Donaire. He pulls out another packet. He gives it to me.

I read the label: “PED.” Performance-­enhancing drugs? I look closer. Oh! It’s a “Performance Energy Drink”—a just-add-water vitamin-boosted raspberry-lemonade elixir he’s cooked up.

Conte waits for the joke to kick in, then laughs. His pencil mustache rolls into a curl, and his light-blue eyes twinkle. It is a gutsy kind of joke to make for Conte, the nutritionist villain in America’s steroid morality play. It was his Balco facilities that the feds raided—targeted simultaneously by the U.S. Attorney, FDA, IRS, the U.S. anti-doping agency, and a local narcotics task force—in a case that made PED use in professional sports a matter of public record. Ballplayers Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, and Jason Giambi, and track-and-field stars Marion Jones and her husband, Tim Montgomery, were all dragged in front of a grand jury, their reputations with them, to testify about potions like “the cream” and “the clear,” prompting new inquiries into steroid use by Major League Baseball and on Capitol Hill. Conte himself was indicted on 42 counts, and faced 30 years in prison.

“They said I was a modern-day Al Capone,” Conte says. “In reality, it was very soft. I pled guilty to sharing a prescription for testosterone and money-laundering of $100, which may be the lowest amount ever in the federal judicial system. I did not cooperate. They asked me to wear a wire. I did not.

“I did four months in Club Fed. You had guys smoking marijuana in there, dealing coke, meth, steroids,” says the onetime funk bass guitarist (he played with Tower of Power and Herbie Hancock). “You had guys in there using baby oil to get a suntan. It was bizarre.”

Now on the outside, Conte is back in the training business, working with world-class boxers Zab Judah, Andre Ward, Andre Berto, and Donaire, whom he is prepping for an October 22 championship fight against Omar Narvaez at Madison Square Garden. (Donaire will win handily.) “I guess it’s fair to say this is my comeback,” Conte says, insisting that the new supplements he’s been feeding Donaire are legal and au naturel. “We give him all sorts of different things: Ubiquinol, beta-alanine, L-cernitine and L-arginine”—this last, Conte says, “to smooth the walls of the muscles in his heart.”

“Man, I have so much energy,” Donaire chirps from the front of the bus, unable to sit still. He turns around to address his team, first singing playfully in Spanish, then his native Tagalog, then talking in English while imitating the Beatles, then singing like the Beatles, then fading back into a Filipino ditty.

“I feel amazing, I feel incredible,” Donaire says. “Now I’m at like 21,000 feet.”

“As the fight gets closer, we’ll bring him up to 22,000 feet,” Conte says.

Altitude is important to Conte: Since Balco, he’s embraced “intermittent hypoxic training,” which starves the body of oxygen by simulating mountain conditions with the help of a breathing mask, triggering the production of red blood cells and erythropoietin, or EPO—a natural energy booster. “For years, you had guys like Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley and all these champions setting up camps at Big Bear,” Conte says. “Up there is the worst place you can go. The problem is there is no time to get a good rest. At that altitude, your body can’t relax. With the machine, we take you all the way up and bring you all the way down.”

“Victor is really good at the downtime,” says Donaire. It is the boxer’s first trip to New York, and he sees the Garden marquee in passing. His name and picture are on it. “How cool!”

On 52nd Street, the bus lurches to a stop. The press conference is in a steakhouse, and the sight of Conte inside raises eyebrows. “I can’t believe he can even walk around like that,” says one wag. “Think of all the careers he ruined, the families.” On the dais, Donaire seems amped to have Conte in his corner. Pumped full of supplements, he is speaking so fast he struggles to get the words out. His lines are tripping over themselves. “Man,” he says, “I have to calm myself down.”

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Original Article: ESPN.com

By Michael Woods

Thursday, October 20, 2011

When Manny Pacquiao fights, the Philippines grind to a halt. Business ceases to get done. Kids clear the streets and huddle around a TV set to see PacMan do his thing in the ring. Even the Muslim guerrilla bands put down their weapons and concentrate on Pacquiao when he gloves up.

Filipino-born Nonito Donaire doesn’t have the power to provoke peace on that level, but the bantamweight champion, who fights unheralded Argentine Omar Narvaez on Saturday at Madison Square Garden’s Theater arena, is edging closer to the Congressman from Sarangani Province on pundits’ pound-for-pound lists, and as a Filipino icon.

“I was told things shut down, everyone watches, but maybe not the rebels,” said Donaire, 28, a San Leandro, Calif., resident who moved from the Philippines when he was 10. “My ratings there are good, but not Pacquiao levels.”

And quite candidly, Donaire isn’t likely to get to the level enjoyed by Pacquiao, regarded in his nation as an athlete/humanitarian unlike any the world has known. At 28-1 with 18 KOs, Donaire will need to stamp on the gas to propel himself into the financial range of Pacquiao, who will make $20 million to fight Juan Manuel Marquez on Nov. 12. (By contrast, Donaire will take home $750,000 for the Narvaez fight.)

In speaking to Donaire, who can disarm with his humility and a heckuva Robert DeNiro-in-”Taxi Driver” impression, you get the sense that he’s aiming for Pacquiao-type achievement in the ring, if not the purse department. Donaire, who has previously snagged titles at flyweight and super fly, talks about a potential progression in weight classes similar to that of his countryman, one that could lead him all the way to 140 pounds.

It’s clear that the stakes here are immense, and Donaire’s ambition level is on par with Pacquiao’s. So it’s no surprise that he seeks out methods and people whom he believes will help him to join and perhaps surpass Pacquiao on the top rungs of the pound-for-pound ladder. Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he has retained the services of the man once known as the bad boy of BALCO, the Notorious VIC, Victor Conte.

It’s possible that Victor Conte dropped off your radar these past few years. In October 2005, he was sentenced to four months in prison and four months of home confinement after pleading guilty to money laundering and steroid distribution. His sentence complete, the man who helped introduce us to a panoply of lengthy chemical compounds — which he had helped introduce to a bevy of world-class athletes such as Olympians Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, major league slugger Jason Giambi and NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski — needed to choose a way to make a living.

An accomplished bass guitar player who gigged with the esteemed Tower of Power in the ’70s, Conte didn’t re-enter the music world. Instead, he went back to concocting nutritional supplements and finding ways for athletes to maximize their bodily potential. Only this time, the man who felt that prosecutors and the media built him into “the Adolf Hitler of sport,” an evil agent who sought to create a master race of athletes, promised he would do it by the book. No cheating, no shortcuts, no administering of banned substances with tongue-twister names.

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Talk about career switches! Victor Conte spent nearly two decades as a professional musician, playing bass with the Oakland group Tower of Power and Herbie Hancock.

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Victor Conte strolls across the lobby, hand extended, eyes squinting from below a hairline deep into its winter of discontent and above a mustache borrowed from Howard Hughes. He wears a sleek sport coat and a Cheshire grin that only Harold Hill’s mother could love. He comes bearing gifts — a bright yellow bag stuffed with bright blue shirts emblazoned with the bright white suspension bridge logo of the now-defunct Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. BALCO, for short. An acronym as infamous as KGB, IRS and DDT, a name synonymous with the biggest steroid scandal in the history of sports, give or take a couple dozen East German female swimmers sporting curiously copious cheek stubble and testosterone levels to shame a saber-toothed tiger.