The opportunity to speak over dinner with a man who helped shape sports in the first decade of the century was so rich I shared it with my former sports editor, who cautioned: “Be careful.”
That skepticism already lurked in me at the mere name of Victor Conte, the former Tower of Power jazz musician who transformed himself into a mad scientist and developed and advised the use of undetectable steroids and/or other PEDs that fueled American Olympic athletes Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, baseball’s home run king Barry Bonds, and hall-of-fame boxer Shane Mosley.
Conte made his Bay Area-based BALCO a notorious hub that altered the sporting landscape, allowing Bonds to one-up his suspected cheating predecessors Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa while strengthening Mosley to a follow-up triumph over his southern California rival, Oscar De La Hoya.
To listen to Conte’s detail over his leadership of “Project World Record”; to see him brazenly smile over the way he beat the testers and flaunted it in the face of law enforcement and to hear him regale listeners with the fun he had during his four-month minimum security federal prison stay was pure theater, and – in a warped way – a joy.
We met that evening – nearly 20 years ago – at a restaurant in Orange County, California, where he told me how he was still devising health supplements, insisting they were clean and legal and proof that he had learned his lesson and wanted to contribute to sports and society in a healthy, sinister-free way.
Did I believe him? I wanted to, but in the back of my mind as an investigative sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times then, I figured I’d be writing about him again – the next time he got busted.
Conte died on Monday at 75 of pancreatic cancer, reaching that hour without a hint of law-enforcement scrutiny while leaving swarms of his devoted athletes shaken and sobbing at the news.
Conte informed BoxingScene of his perilous diagnosis in June, noting it arrived at an especially inopportune time because he had seven key fighters to help prepare for upcoming bouts – including eventual undisputed super-middleweight champion Terence Crawford, women’s heavyweight champion Claressa Shields, super-flyweight champion Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez, and welterweight champion Mario Barrios.
“To have seven fighters on huge platforms in the midst of fighting cancer… this is what I do,” Conte told me that day. “I will overcome this adversity. I have a history of overcoming adversity. And I will beat cancer. I’m still in the saddle. It’s not like I need to get back in the saddle.”
Conte relished the effects of the supplements, devices and workout regimens he created for his fighters.
Frankly, it helped him that boxing’s sordid history provided him entry to the sport, as he watched his Zinc-based powders and pills maximize workouts and provide powerful rest and recovery for its athletes.
The first story I ever did on Conte coming clean mentioned his alliance with then-super-middleweight champion Andre Ward, who believed in the clean results, but was angered at me for publicly linking him to the main character of the book “Game of Shadows” on the BALCO era.
It didn’t deter Conte, who changed his company’s name to SNAC (Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning) and continued hustling not only to sponsor fighters, but to urge them to commit to a stringent drugs-testing policy he helped develop for Margaret Goodman’s Voluntary Anti-Doping Association.
Upon leaving prison, where he was heartbroken by the separation from his family, Conte reached out to, among others, World Anti-Doping Agency head Dick Pound and the brilliant tester Don Catlin from the University of California, Los Angeles. He informed them of loopholes they needed to address and provided invaluable insight from a life spent on the side of deception.
“He rectified a wrong,” said the trainer Bob Santos, who sent fighters, including Barrios, to Conte. “From where Victor once was, moving forward, he did everything in his power to clean up sports.”
A divide with the man who previously arrested him – former federal investigator Jeff Novitzky – and the individual who never stopped doubting him, US Anti-Doping Agency head Travis Tygart, continued. But Conte took great delight in how their roles had flip-flopped.
Here was Conte providing legal nutritional items to champion athletes and advocating for VADA 24/7/365 testing, and here was Novitzky – as UFC’s senior vice-president of athlete health and performance – and Tygart in lucrative paying roles where the limited number of positive PED results raised eyebrows.
By building a SNAC gym and obsessively making himself available to the fighters, Conte became one of the sport’s most connected sources.
Once, I asked him about plans for a fighter, and he would cackle and claim “I know everything”, proceeding to pass along the full details of the given fight card that others would confirm.
Beyond that, he was a wealth of knowledge on those occasions when an athlete would test positive for a banned substance none of us could pronounce.
He would detail why it was banned, what the substance did, and provide an intricate, understandable explanation for why this deserved punishment. His expertise in cheating and how to catch a cheat famously got him in a row with Haney’s opponent in 2024 Ryan Garcia following Garcia’s three positive tests for the banned substance ostarine.
And he took great pride in seeing a decorated champion like Crawford embrace the effect of the supplements and the apparatus that would measure his stunningly low resting heartbeat that confirmed the superiority of his conditioning before his 154lbs title victory over Israil Madrimov in 2024.
The last time we spoke, Conte was so excited over the year-long plan to help Crawford smartly inflate to super middleweight; to rely on the muscle and fitness he gained to upset Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in the year’s richest prizefight.
In a far less momentous “project”, the goodness of Conte was seen when I casually confided to him that I’d started running in 2017 in an effort to become healthier.
“Let me send you some ZMA, Aerobitine, Vitalyze and Xpedite,” he said. “Dollow the instructions and let me know what you think.”
After more than 10 half-marathons run over five years, I thanked Conte for helping to fuel the success.
“For a guy in his 50s, that’s pretty good,” Conte said.
Conte’s final text messages to me read: “I feel blessed and I feel fun. I feel good. Let’s go!”
He then posted a Muhammad Ali quote: “In the face of the impossible, faith unlocks divine solutions… impossible is nothing.”
I didn’t realize how fast the cancer was getting to him when he sent me video of a humorous evening we shared over dinner. We had called his then-super-middleweight champion Demetrious Andrade to discuss his victory that night, and Andrade cracked that all he wanted to do was to get back to making love with his wife. We all roared in laughter.
“Fun dinner,” Conte texted.
As recently as October I texted him for a story I wanted to do on constructing the perfect preparation plan that helped Crawford defeat Alvarez.
“Maybe later… later today,” he responded.
When I asked how he was doing days later, there was no response.
Upon seeing Haney’s social-media post that Conte had died, I felt the void. What kind of hell did he endure? What was he thinking? Had he found peace?
I looked back on my story on Conte in June. Most of the answers were there.
“It’s been a very difficult time,” he said. “I’m just glad to be able to continue to do what I do. None of this is about money. It’s never been about making money for me. I’ve got a ton of money saved. I get to do what I love to do with the people I love to work with.
“Even during these tough times, I feel blessed to be in this position and do what I love the most. [T]o be in the trenches with world-class athletes, helping them achieve historic performances.”