Memories of Victor Conte

I met Victor Conte when I worked at Flex magazine as a senior writer. One day, the editor in chief, the brilliant Peter McGough, walked two men into my cubicle and introduced them. It was Victor Conte and his second-in-command at the time Jim Valente. They were from San Francisco and worked at a company called BALCO. I had never heard of them. Just a few years later, BALCO would be making headlines in every sports section in North America.

            This was 1998, and Victor was pitching a product called ZMA. He had visited the headquarters of Weider Publications in Woodland Hill, California, to speak with representatives from Weider Nutrition, who had a few execs there. They weren’t interested in Victor or ZMA.

            Victor, however, had a story. A great one I was keenly interested in. He worked with elite athletes and had started a project of consulting with a large group of professional bodybuilders, many of them top competitors of the era. These were athletes I covered and talked to often. Victor had done micronutrient analysis of the bodybuilders and had informed them of certain deficiencies, mostly minerals, and adjusted their intake.

            Victor gave me some of the details of his research and I told him I would follow up.

I immediately liked him, or at least I was interested in him as a subject to cover. He spoke of his work succinctly without hype or a sales pitch. He asked me to follow up with the bodybuilders as proof that his theories were correct. He told me a little about his life, how he got involved in micronutrient research, founded BALCO, and enjoyed working with athletes. He also told me he played bass for Tower of Power, funk legends my older brother played often as we drove around the Detroit suburbs when I was in high school. Now, I really was interested in him as a subject. 

            The bodybuilding stars I spoke with praised Victor, saying his micronutrient analysis had made a positive difference, especially with their training. I remember Ronnie Coleman and Flex Wheeler were among them.

            I can’t tell you how rare it was in those days for elite bodybuilders to agree on anything, much less a nutritional regimen. Though they endorsed nutritional supplements, they rarely claimed, off the record, that any of these products made a difference. I followed up with Victor and wrote a story called, “Magical Mineral Tour.” It got traction.

            Thus began a long working relationship with Victor Conte that took numerous dramatic turns, to put it lightly. It was Victor who arranged for me to do an exclusive interview with Olympic track star Marion Jones, an athlete he was consulting, that I wrote for Flex. Later, he would do the same with Barry Bonds, who I interviewed in the BALCO offices for Muscle & Fitness.

            It wasn’t long after my interview with Bonds that BALCO was raided by federal officers. There’s not a lot to add about the BALCO case that hasn’t already been hashed out numerous times. It was a bit of a Rorschach test for journalists and sports commentators who viewed the BALCO investigation through their own preconceptions, and few budged from their initial assumptions.

            It’s no surprise that when Victor took his first steps into the public space in the aftermath of the BALCO raid, everyone misjudged the man. This was a scandal tailor-made for the times, which the federal authorities were counting on. It was easy to paint Victor in broad strokes. He was an unknown quantity, allowing journalists to offer facile assessments that turned him into a stock villain, an obvious huckster and cheat—a shadowy Mephistophelean figure who collected souls and banished good men to the trash heap, or at least out of contention for the MLB Hall of Fame. And he played the part at first, not because that was his identity, but because of his unyielding spirit of defiance.

Time proved that he was never this caricature, guilty of masterminding the greatest sports doping scandal in history. He faced 44 charges, but when the evidence was presented, he was found guilty of only two—tax dodging and distribution of banned substances. He had faced the full weight of the US Justice Department and never buckled.

It took its toll, of course. I visited him during his four-month stint in Tate Prison in Southern California, and it was his lowest moment because of the pain it caused his family. He vowed that he would never put them through another ordeal.

After his release, he began working with boxers and vowed to clean up the sport. He loudly called out doping in combat sports, naming names and demanding drug tests through an organization called VADA (Voluntary Anti-Doping Association). 

His actions during the BALCO era propelled him into the second chapter of his career, but it wasn’t the sole motivator. What many missed was that the principles driving Victor in his role as anti-doping expert were the same ones that drove him during his BALCO days: Making sure his athletes were on an even playing field and not at a disadvantage from athletes who were doping.

This basic premise seems to have escaped mainstream journalists, simply because they couldn’t wrap their heads around the ubiquity of drug use in sports. As Victor would often say, to think that sports—professional or elite amateur—was drug-free except for a few bad apples was the same as believing in the tooth fairy.

The moral calculus that attached itself to the BALCO scandal was disproportionate to the actual facts, but more so, it missed the real scandal, of which Conte and BALCO are only footnotes. Most sports media, uneducated about doping, training, and the properties of extreme muscular gains in a single offseason, unleashed their moral scolding on inviting targets (e.g.., Barry Bonds) that ended up being a kind of sportswriter “revenge of the nerds” frolic.

Victor shook it all off, but he understood the stigma and how the climb back would always be met with skepticism of his motives and moral character. But I knew better.  The true character of Victor Conte was always there for the world to see. He cared about his athletes, always watchful of their health through careful monitoring, even when his career took a dark turn. His loyalty to the boxers he took under his wing endured through multiple challenges, which often saw him quarrelling with boxing managers and promoters on social media. He was unyielding in his pursuit of fairness for his athletes, and he called out established boxing professionals who weren’t used to being confronted.

That was his element. And post-BALCO, he was never more determined to see justice done. His fighters responded. More than 30 world champion boxers worked with Victor. An autodidact who had an ability to absorb information and apply it while adding his own modifications, Victor devised cutting edge techniques that gave his fighters an edge over the competition.

Victor knew it was never going to be enough. He was keenly aware of perceptions from the media and public. I remember speaking to him often about the documentary Netflix wanted to do about him. He knew he had little control over how they would portray him, and he wanted to back out multiple times. But he knew that not cooperating, not telling his story in his own words, would give him no control of how he would be depicted. He participated, allowing nearly full access to his day-to-day life.

In the end, the documentary (Untold: Hall of Shame, released in August 2023) was fair to Victor. He was allowed to voice his regrets, his emotions registering the depth of his sorrow for what he put his family through. Redemption was an endless fight for him, but he was always up for a fight.

 It was a shock when I learned that Victor had developed pancreatic cancer and was just days from the end. I didn’t know he was ill, and the time period from diagnosis to his passing was brief. I never got to say goodbye.

            Victor had type of mysterious life force, undefined and of unknown origins. Something formed in his character at a young age that propelled him to labor through all obstacles, never relent, and seek his goal, no matter how difficult the path.

He was a devotee of Ernest Holmes and his teachings on the science of mind. Victor fed his spirit with positive affirmations and visions of achievement. This mental discipline served him well, channeled his obsessions, whether it was as a bass player for Tower of Power and jazz legend Herbie Hanckock, creating a new supplement that continues to be a top seller, or counseling some of the greatest athletes in the world.

            At some point, I went from covering Victor as a writer to being his friend. I got to know his wife, Mandy, whom he loved dearly. He never stopped enjoying life, despite the slings and arrows of those who never gave him a second chance, though he had earned it.

            Victor was a great friend—open, loyal, funny, and endlessly interesting. I miss him dearly. We had so much more to talk about.