Original Article: Sports Illustrated
Jun 28, 2017
By Tim Layden
Today Victor Conte is selling. He was selling yesterday, too, and he will be selling tomorrow. He has been selling something or other for more than three decades, with a notable shift to mastermind a notorious steroid program 17 years ago and serve prison time for his role in that endeavor, and, strictly speaking, that affair was probably a sale too—the sale of a lifetime. He arrives at the front door of his business carrying a clear plastic bag full of freshly laundered towels, dressed in a loose-fitting surf shirt and baggy jeans, like a paunchy dad en route to a Jimmy Buffet concert. The business is called SNAC Nutrition, on the corner of a business strip mall in San Carlos, Calif., located some 25 miles south of downtown San Francisco and even closer to the BALCO lab where the scandal that came to be known by that same name was birthed. A black banner hangs across the front windows announcing in bold yellow letters: SPORTS NUTRITION SUPER SALE.
Inside the door, Conte, 66, conducts a tour of the facility so energetically that he rarely completes a sentence and eventually runs short of breath, with small beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. The man loves his work. “We’re having some fun,” he says, and not just once. SNAC Nutrition, a business that Conte launched after BALCO, but more than a decade before he started dealing steroids, is a wholesale distributor of nutritional supplements, primarily ZMA, a combination of zinc, magnesium and vitamin B6 that Conte created and that may or may not help users sleep better and recover more efficiently from workouts, but which is purchased briskly by the public. SNAC, however, is not just a supplement business; it’s also a swanky training center at which more than two dozen boxers have augmented their training for professional championship fights and Olympic competition and that several call their permanent training base.
