Conte remained active in boxing, working with some of the top athletes even as he battled pancreatic cancer over 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 as part of an Internal Revenue Service investigation.
“There will always be people who say I’m the devil, who hate me and think I’m the man who destroyed the national pastime,” Conte told the Bay Area News Group during a visit to his Burlingame supplement company in 2011. “I understand that I made some bad decisions and harmed a lot of people. But I’m not going to give up my life.”
Conte stayed true to his word until the end.
After serving a four-month prison sentence in 2005-2006, Conte launched a supplement company called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, or SNAC.
SNAC offered Conte an entrepreneurial path to rebuild his wealth and reputation. In 2011, he claimed sales of 100,000 bottles per 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 of 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 wanted to help athletes work without performance-enhancing drugs.
Conte’s family said he has trained 32 world champions in multiple sports, including Terence Crawford, who became the undisputed super middleweight title winner 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,” Mauricio Sulaimán, president of the World Boxing Council, said in a statement. “In recent years, he has dedicated his vast knowledge and experience to advancing excellence in the physical preparation of combat athletes.”
Crawford’s victory “reaffirms the lasting power of (Conte’s) methods,” the family said in a statement to BANG on Tuesday.
Former San Jose State quarterback Adam Tafralis said Conte’s work in the sport will be seen as part of the evolution of athletes from the 1980s to the 1990s.
“Sport is fickle and the way stories are created is always interesting,” said Tafralis, whose late father was one of Conte’s closest friends.
While Conte came to terms with the consequences of his actions in the early 2000s when he created a then-undiscovered steroid called THC, he also helped illuminate the extent of performance-enhancing drug use across the spectrum of American sports.
A former high school track star, Conte had a keen interest in working with Olympians and baseball and football players by supplying them with banned drugs that would help improve performance.Conte told a reporter from the Bay Area News Group in multiple interviews that he carefully monitored his athletes’ blood work to ensure they did not suffer serious side effects from a cocktail of performance drugs.
“BALCO has had a profound effect on national and international awareness of the extent of the drug problem in sport at all levels,” said Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, in 2007.
Born in Fresno on January 10, 1950, the eldest 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 his parents’ chagrin, Conte dropped out of school to join a Los Angeles band called Common Ground. His bass guitar work eventually led Conte to play for the famous funk group Tower of Power from 1977 to 1979.
He also collaborated with jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and violinist Sugarcane Harris. Later in his life, Conte told a reporter how much he enjoyed making music, but touring kept him away from home and his daughters for too long.
Eventually he left the transient life to settle on the peninsula. Conte turned his photographic memory into learning about microminerals and nutrition.
He founded BALCO in 1984, which led to collaborations with some unsavory characters in the world of bodybuilding. They taught Conte how to make 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 pitchers how the system was rigged and that drug tests, he told BANG years later, were 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 things,” he said. “Not just in Kenya and Russia, it happened here in the United States.”
Adam Tafralis and his sister Alexa, a well-known Bay Area bodybuilder, received 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 backyard barbecues in the ’80s to two guys they talked about on ’60 Minutes.’ ”
By the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, 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 hearings in Congress and forced Major League Baseball officials to adopt stricter drug testing policies to counter the “steroid age” image.
Conte served four months in 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 optimistic, telling a BANG reporter that he had made friends in “Club Fed.”
“It looks 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 the age of 92.
#BALCO #architect #Victor #Conte #loses #battle #cancer #age