Original Article: MMA Fighting
By Marc Raimondi
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Victor Conte, the former Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) founder infamous for his distributing steroids to athletes, said he has seen cases where an athlete takes testosterone and ends up testing positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone. Conte attributes that to underground labs and cross contamination.
“Was it a contaminated nutritional supplement that [Jones] bought over the counter?” said Conte, a sports nutritionist who is now working again with athletes as the CEO of Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning. “Was it a contaminated underground steroid that had been manufactured? You can buy testosterone and test positive for nandrolone, because you get this ultra-trace cross contamination.”
Another wrinkle in all of this is Jones’ other positive drug test for the anti-estrogen agents clomiphene and Letrozol in July 2016. He served a one-year suspension in his USADA case for that violation, which Jones explained as coming from tainted sexual enhancement pills.
Conte said that positive test makes things “highly suspicious,” because of those drugs’ roles as post-cycle therapy for steroid users. Conte said he has been questioning Jones going back to 2015 when lab results came back showing Jones had lower levels of testosterone than he deemed normal.
