'I saw Jones injecting drugs'
This is the most staggering of the many claims made by Victor Conte, the founder of the designer drugs pharmacy, the Bay Area Laboratories Co-Operative (BALCO), in an astonishing interview with ESPN The Magazine. The magazine was published yesterday to coincide with a television interview with Conte that was broadcast in the United States last night and that was expected to deliver similarly damaging claims. Jones has always insisted she is clean, but hers is by no means the only reputation that has been savaged by Conte's sudden decision to break his silence.
The suggestion that Jones might not be clean is not new. It has been discussed in the media all year. Likewise Tim Montgomery, her partner, the world 100 metres record-holder, who faces doping charges. But Conte, who has been charged with 35 counts of steroid distribution and money-laundering, delivers his tell-all testimony with a chilling relish that taints the entire sport of athletics.
"Did I do things wrong?" he asks. "Yes. Am I the only one? No. The whole system is rotten. I have too much information to go quietly. They want to expose the rotten side of sports? Bring it on. It's about fooling the public. You think it's over, just because they've indicted me? Please. There's a new version (designer drug) out there right now. It's 'The Stuff III'. If the feds hadn't raided BALCO, I'd have got it by now.
"People have asked me: 'Do you feel guilty about what you did? Are you ashamed?' The answer is no. I got to a point where I realised elite sport is about doing what you have to do to win. My clients didn't come to BALCO to learn how to do drugs. Most were already using (drugs) before they came.
"I've seen athletes being forced to decide whether to use or not use, and it's much more painful for them to entertain the idea of giving up their dream than to use anabolic steroids. That's what's really going on. That's the choice athletes face when they get to the very top."
Conte's interview contains extraordinary detail about Jones and the drugs regime that he oversaw, beginning with the build-up to the Sydney Olympics.
"CJ (Hunter, the shot-putter and her husband at the time) had called me six weeks before the Olympics to ask me to work with Marion," he says. "I started providing her with insulin, growth hormone, EPO and 'The Clear' (users' slang for THG) as well as nutritional supplements. She was on all of it at the 2000 Games. I tell you this knowing Marion passed a lie-detector test saying it's not true. All that shows me is lie detectors don't work."
Jones's lawyer Richard Nicholls yesterday re-iterated his client's denials, although Conte's revelations are likely to add further fuel to what is already a raging fire.
"Marion has steadfastly maintained her position throughout: she has never, ever used performance-enhancing drugs," said Nicholls. "Mr Conte is simply not credible. We challenge him to submit to the same lie detector procedure that Marion Jones passed."
Having claimed that lie detectors don't work, Conte is unlikely to rise to that challenge, but with nothing to lose, this isn't likely to be the last of Conte's revelations.
He takes up the Jones story again in April 2001: "I was sitting in an Embassy Suites hotel room in Covina, California, about a foot away from Marion. The next day, she was going to try to break the world record in the 300 metres. It was her first competition of the 2001 season, and we were both excited.
"She came to my room for a new piece of equipment I'd brought, a $1,000 NovoPen injector that looked like a Sharpie (marker pen) and can be used for human growth hormone (HGH). I needed to teach her how to use it. Marion wasn't the least bit nervous; she's always in control. She pulled the Spandex of her bicycle shorts above her right thigh. She dialled up a dose of four units of HGH and injected it into her quadriceps.
"She won the race the next day, but didn't break the record, which has stood since 1984. I wasn't surprised. Back then, before year-round drug testing, sprinters could use as much as they liked, as long as they tapered off just before a race. No one can get away with that today.
"I liked Marion and I don't think she was doing anything differently than anyone else. But I do know she was using the very best stuff. If you ask me, the worst thing that ever happened to Marion's career was leaving CJ. He was hugely responsible for making sure she did what she was supposed to."
Conte then explains how he "had to reprimand her for getting careless," how she twice left HGH cartridges in the fridges of hotel rooms. It was this danger, he says, that caused their split.
But the story simply continues. "Soon I was working with their (Jones and Montgomery's) rivals," he says. It is here that Dwain Chambers, of Great Britain, enters the story, another who, despite being banned, continues to profess his innocence. Conte says he gave Chambers "the full enchilada": 'The Clear,' insulin, EPO, growth hormone, modafinil and a testosterone cream.
Enter also Kelli White, who won double sprint gold in the 2003 World Championships but was subsequently stripped of her titles. "She became a very disciplined student," he says. "Besides the same things Dwain was on, she also was taking a new drug I'd started using, thyroid hormone T-3. It makes all the other drugs work more effectively by accelerating metabolic rate. You feel light as a feather."
His passing observation on Montgomery is chilling. "As soon as I found out what Tim was taking, I said: 'You're oversaturated with performance-enhancing drugs. Too much is just as bad as not enough.'"
While America has become rather apathetic towards track and field, its national pastime, baseball, is also being dragged through the mire with the BALCO scandal.
Papers leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday say that last year Barry Bonds, seven-time National League MVP, told a federal grand jury investigating BALCO that he used a cream and a clear substance during 2003 supplied by Greg Anderson, his personal trainer, who is linked to BALCO and was charged this year with distributing steroids.
The ESPN interview takes in Conte's introduction to the world of pharmaceuticals 20 years ago, how he learnt to analyse blood, mineral and vitamin deficiencies and how he helped Matt Biondi (legally), the outstanding swimmer of the 1988 Olympics. He then explains how he started working with American footballers, body-builders and, eventually, athletes.
But besides attempting to take Jones down with him, Conte's interview is an extended snigger at how he beat the system and how the drug-testing procedure has been inept and corrupt.
Of White, he says: "What amazes me is that all through the (2003 World) Championships, the only thing (of the seven drugs) the testers caught Kelli using was modafinil, a drug for narcolepsy."
And he says this of Montgomery: "Want to hear something amazing? There's a BALCO calendar for Tim that shows he was taking insulin, EPO, growth hormone, 'The Clear' and adrenaline - five different performance-enhancing agents - through 2001. At the end of June, Tim won the USA Championship. Soon after, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) sent him a post-competition letter that said: 'Congratulations, Tim. You've tested negative for all performance-enhancing substances in the sample that was collected'. He was using all these drugs and USADA couldn't detect any of them.
"So how easy is it to beat the USADA test? It's like taking candy from a baby." (© The Times, London)
- Owen Slot
