Sports Illustrated‘s The Truth describes Victor Conte’s drug operation, which sold a useless supplement called ZMA to the masses while supplying elite athletes all sorts of potent drugs, in return for their endorsements — of ZMA:
Although Olympic athletes faced the toughest steroid policy in sports, Conte came to realize that beating the testers was not difficult. He worked to provide a broad menu of drugs that were hard to detect. Among those he ultimately offered were growth hormone; erythropoietin, or EPO, the oxygen-boosting drug; the diabetes drug insulin, which also was particularly potent when cocktailed with other substances; norbolethone, a.k.a. the Clear, a powerful anabolic developed by Wyeth Laboratories in the 1960s but never brought to market (possibly because of doubts about its safety); a testosterone-based balm that Conte called the Cream; and the narcolepsy drug modafinil, a powerful stimulant that athletes took directly before competing.Growth hormone and insulin were completely undetectable. The EPO test couldn’t detect all forms of the drug. Testers wouldn’t screen for norbolethone, a drug that had never been marketed. And the Cream was a mixture of synthetic testosterone and epitestosterone that concealed what would otherwise be telltale signs of the use of an undetectable steroid.
Conte created a simple “alphabet” shorthand for his drugs — for example, “E” for EPO, “G” for growth hormone, “I” for insulin — to be used on calendars he and the athletes kept. The calendars would list when athletes were scheduled to take which drugs, and they also indicated the dates of competitions so that the drugs’ effects would be peaking at the right time. Conte also kept a ledger that detailed the types of drugs athletes were using, as well as the results of blood and urine tests conducted on the athletes. Conte engaged in this “pretesting” to make sure his athletes would pass drug tests.
Conte was very pleased to do business with Bonds’s trainer. It meant he could add the greatest baseball player of the modern era to the BALCO stable of athletes. At minimum it was another big name Conte could drop on the Internet chat boards, another celebrity whose name and photo could be exploited to promote his business and himself. “Barry takes ZMA every night without fail,” he would write on one board. “Barry is a big fan of ZMA.”
Anderson, meanwhile, sold Bonds on Conte by dropping the names of the Olympians and NFL stars already using BALCO. Of course the real BALCO program had little to do with ZMA — instead, it gave Bonds access to state-of-the-art drugs like the Clear, which other elite athletes had begun calling “Rocket Fuel” and “the magic potion.” A BALCO connection had additional value because it provided Bonds with a cover story for his radically transformed appearance.