BALCO architect Victor Conte loses battle with cancer at age of 75

Victor Conte, a pioneering San Mateo nutritionist who was at the center of one of the biggest sports drug scandals in history involving Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and many other star athletes, and who later became a leading anti-doping advocate in the world of boxing, died early Monday morning, his daughters announced. He was 75.

Conte remained active in boxing, working with some of the sport’s top athletes even as he battled pancreatic cancer for the past year.

He had spent much of the past two decades seeking redemption for his role in the BALCO episode that led to a 42-count indictment from an Internal Revenue Service investigation.

“There are always going to be people who say I’m the devil, who hate me and think I’m the guy who destroyed the national pastime,” Conte told the Bay Area News Group during a 2011 visit to his Burlingame supplement company. “I understand I made some bad decisions and harmed a lot of people. But I’m not going to give up living my life.”

Conte was true to his word to the end.

After serving a four-month prison sentence in 2005-06, Conte launched a supplement company called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, or SNAC.

SNAC provided an entrepreneurial path for Conte to rebuild his net worth and reputation. By 2011, he claimed sales of 100,000 bottles a month of his ZMA sleep enhancer, a zinc supplement.

His office in a San Carlos industrial park just off U.S. 101 was decorated with photos and memorabilia from athletes Conte had worked with during his high-flying BALCO days as well as boxers.

As SNAC grew, so did Conte’s presence in boxing, where he aimed to help athletes work without performance-enhancing drugs.

Conte’s family said he trained 32 world champions in multiple sports, including Terence Crawford, who became the undisputed super middleweight titleist after upsetting Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez in September.

Conte also worked with boxing stars Andre Ward, Nonito Donaire and Zab Judah, among others.

“Victor Conte was a prominent figure in the field of physical conditioning and nutrition in professional sports,” World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaimán said in a statement. “In recent years, he dedicated his vast knowledge and experience to promoting excellence in the physical preparation of combat athletes.”

Crawford’s victory “reaffirms the enduring power of (Conte’s) methods,” the family said Tuesday in a statement to BANG.

Adam Tafralis, the former San Jose State star quarterback, said Conte’s work in sports will be seen as part of the evolution of athletes from the 1980s to ‘90s.

“Sports are fickle and how narratives are spun are always interesting,” said Tafralis, whose late father was one of Conte’s best friends.

While Conte accepted the consequences of his actions in the early 2000s while creating a then-undetected steroid called THC, he also helped illuminate the extent of performance-enhancing drug use across the spectrum of American sports.

As a former high school track star, Conte had a big interest in working with Olympians and baseball and football players by supplying them with banned drugs purported to help improve performance.

Conte told a Bay Area News Group reporter in multiple interviews that he carefully monitored his athletes’ bloodwork to ensure they did not suffer serious side effects from a cocktail of performance drugs.

“BALCO has had a deep effect on the national and international awareness of the depth of the drug problem within sports at all levels,” said Travis Tygart, CEO for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, in 2007.

Born in Fresno on January 10, 1950, as the oldest of three children, Conte graduated from McLane High School as a track star before attending Fresno City College, where he continued to run.

Much to the chagrin of his parents, Conte quit school to join a Los Angeles-based band called Common Ground. His bass guitar work eventually led Conte to play for the famed funk group, Tower of Power, from 1977-79.

He also collaborated with jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and violinist Sugarcane Harris. Later in life, Conte told a reporter how much he enjoyed creating music, but touring kept him away from home and his daughters for too long.

He eventually left the transient life to settle on the Peninsula. Conte turned his photographic memory into learning about micro minerals and nutrition.

He founded BALCO in 1984, which led to working with some unsavory characters in the world of bodybuilding. They taught Conte how to create designer steroids.

Around the same time, Conte became close with Gregg Tafralis, a 1988 Olympic shot putter from San Bruno who was eventually banned for drug use.

Conte learned from Tafralis and other throwers how the system was rigged and drug testing, he would tell BANG years later, was a farce.

In 2016, Conte told this news organization, “Look at some of the things I said in 2003 — I knew all the state-sponsored stuff,” he said. “Not only in Kenya and Russia, it was going on right here in the United States.”

Adam Tafralis and his sister Alexa, a well-known Bay Area bodybuilder, got a text from their mother on Tuesday saying their father, who died in 2023, and Conte were now in heaven “talking about how they went from barbecuing in the backyard in the ‘80s to being two guys talked about on ‘60 Minutes.’ ”

By the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 many top athletes sought Conte’s help, including baseball stars Jason and Jeremy Giambi and home run king Barry Bonds.

The federal investigation led to congressional hearings and forced Major League Baseball officials to create stricter drug-testing policies to counter the image of the “Steroid Era.”

Conte served four months at a minimum-security prison in Taft after pleading guilty to a money laundering charge and a steroid distribution charge as part of a plea deal.

He remained upbeat, telling a BANG reporter he had made friends in “Club Fed.”

“It’s like a men’s retreat here,” he said during a reporter’s visit in 2006.

Funeral services are pending. He is survived by his wife Amanda Tubbs Conte, sister Cheryl Ginsberg and brother Ron Conte, daughters Alicia Stearman, Kisha Conte and Veronica Schuhmacher, and eight grandchildren, Abigail, Violet, Ella, Kayla, Justin, Shelby, Zachariah and Ezekiel. His mother, Shirley Deora Conte, died in April at age 92.