BALCO — A Nutrition Lab That Built an Undetectable Steroid and Got Caught by a Syringe in the Mail

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.

East German state doping — A State That Doped Its Own Athletes, Many of Them Children, and Was Convicted of Bodily Harm

Between the early 1970s and German reunification in 1990, the German Democratic Republic ran the most comprehensive state-organized doping program in the history of sport. It was not the work of rogue coaches or individual cheats. It was government policy, codified in 1974 as a state research plan and administered through the country’s sports and medical hierarchy. On July 18, 2000, a Berlin court convicted the former head of the GDR sports federation, Manfred Ewald, and the program’s chief medical overseer, Dr. Manfred Höppner, as accessories to the intentional bodily harm of athletes, including minors. Ewald received a 22-month suspended sentence; Höppner received an 18-month suspended sentence. Those convictions are the verdict on record.

The program’s principal drug was Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid manufactured by the state-owned pharmaceutical firm Jenapharm. It was given to athletes across many sports, frequently to teenage girls, and frequently without their knowledge or informed consent. Many were told they were taking vitamins. The doses were calibrated by sport and tracked centrally, and the medical apparatus that administered the steroids was the same apparatus that worked to keep athletes from testing positive in international competition. Estimates of the number of athletes affected run to roughly 10,000 over the program’s lifetime.

The harm was real and, for many, permanent. Female athletes experienced virilization; athletes of both sexes have suffered cardiovascular disease, liver and reproductive damage, and serious psychological consequences. The most widely known case is that of Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European shot put champion, who was doped from her teens and who has said the steroids contributed to a gender identity she was never given the chance to discover for herself; she underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 1997 and lives as Andreas Krieger. The damage done to the people the state was meant to represent is the center of this case.

The trials that followed reunification could not undo any of that. They established, as a matter of law, that officials at the top of the system had knowingly caused bodily harm to athletes in their care, and that some of those athletes were children who could not have consented even if they had been asked.