The Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative — BALCO — presented itself as a humble nutritional supplement company in Burlingame, California, run by a former funk bassist named Victor Conte. What it actually ran, for several years up to 2003, was a doping operation built around a steroid that no drug test could find. On February 12, 2004, a federal grand jury returned a 42-count indictment against Conte and three associates for conspiracy, distribution of anabolic steroids, and money laundering. On July 15, 2005, Conte pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute steroids and one count of money laundering. In October 2005 he was sentenced to four months in federal prison and four months of house arrest. The verdict on record is a criminal conviction.
The edge BALCO sold was chemistry the testers had never seen. Its signature product, tetrahydrogestrinone — “the clear” — was a synthetic anabolic steroid deliberately engineered to be invisible to the standard urine assays of the day. Alongside it came “the cream,” a testosterone-and-epitestosterone ointment designed to mask the hormonal ratios doping tests measured, plus human growth hormone, EPO, and modafinil. The drugs reached more than 30 elite athletes across track and field, Major League Baseball, and the NFL — among them sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery and baseball’s Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi.
The scheme that no laboratory could detect was undone by the lowest-tech intervention imaginable: in June 2003 an anonymous coach mailed a used syringe of “the clear” to the US Anti-Doping Agency. A chemist reverse-engineered it, built a test, and screened hundreds of stored samples. Suddenly the undetectable was detectable, and the athletes who had banked on permanent invisibility were standing in the open.
What followed was a cascade. Conte and his co-defendants took plea deals and short sentences. The athletes took bans — most for two to four years — and in the highest-profile case, Marion Jones surrendered five Olympic medals and went to federal prison, not for doping but for lying to investigators about it. The lab that promised its clients they would never be caught had, in the end, caught all of them.
Operación Puerto was the Spanish police investigation that, in May 2006, cracked open the blood-doping ring run by the Madrid sports doctor Eufemiano Fuentes — and produced a paradox that still defines it. The athletes who used the ring were banned; the doctor who ran it walked free. When the Guardia Civil raided Fuentes’s premises they found roughly two hundred coded bags of frozen blood and plasma, a refrigerated library of athletes’ own blood waiting to be reinfused at the competition moments that mattered. The sporting verdicts followed over several years; the criminal verdict against Fuentes was overturned on a legal technicality so tidy it has become the case’s epitaph.
The mechanism was autologous blood doping — the oldest trick in endurance sport, modernized into a service. An athlete’s blood would be withdrawn, stored, and reinfused later to raise the red-cell count and the oxygen-carrying capacity that cycling lives on, often alongside EPO. Because the reinfused blood was the athlete’s own, it left little for a standard test to catch; the evidence was not in the rider’s veins on test day but in Fuentes’s freezers, labelled with code names. “Puerto,” fittingly for a cycling scandal, is Spanish for a mountain pass — the operation was, in effect, Operation Mountain Pass. The code names became the case’s grim parlour game: bags marked “Jan” or numbered identifiers were matched by DNA to specific riders.
The sporting reckoning, when it came, was real. Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour de France champion, was banned for two years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in February 2012, with his results from May 2005 to his 2007 retirement annulled — including his third place at the 2005 Tour. Ivan Basso, identified by the code name “Birillo” (the name of his dog), was suspended after admitting involvement and pulled from the 2006 Giro. Alejandro Valverde, linked by DNA to a bag, was banned for two years by CAS on a worldwide basis, backdated to January 2010. The ring’s clients paid in suspensions and erased palmarès.
Fuentes did not. A Madrid court convicted him in 2013 of a public-health offence — a one-year suspended sentence plus a four-year ban from sports medicine — and ordered the bags of blood destroyed. In June 2016 a higher Madrid court acquitted him outright, reasoning that a person’s own blood reinfused into that person is not a “substance” endangering public health under the statute, and noting the inconvenient truth that doping was not a crime in Spain when the ring operated. WADA and the UCI had to fight just to stop the evidence being incinerated. The doctor went free; the blood, very nearly, went into the furnace.