BALCO affair

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The BALCO affair was a doping scandal about the American company Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) uncovered in 2003 by journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams . BALCO founder and owner Victor Conte , BALCO Vice President James Valente , the trainer Greg Anderson and the sprint trainer Remi Korchemny had provided top-class American and European sports stars with designer steroids such as GHG and growth hormones for several years .

The company BALCO

BALCO, a company founded in 1984 and headquartered in Burlingame , California , was a blood and urinalysis service provider and traded in nutritional supplements . In 1988, Victor Conte offered a group of athletes called the BALCO Olympians free blood and urine samples and nutritional supplements, and accompanied the athletes during the Summer Olympics in Seoul . From 1996 Conte worked with the well-known American football star Bill Romanowski , through whom he was able to establish further contacts with athletes and coaches such as the sprint coach Remi Korchemny . A little later, Conte and Korchemny founded the ZMA Track Club for marketing purposes , an association to which sprinter Marion Jones and sprinter Tim Montgomery also belonged. In 2000, Conte got in touch with well-known US baseball star Barry Bonds through trainer Greg Anderson, who worked in a nearby gym . Contact with other baseball players was established through bonds.

Exposure of the scandal / investigation

In August 2002, the public prosecutor officially opened an investigation into BALCO on allegations of tax evasion. The United States Anti-Doping Agency received an anonymous phone call from US track and field coach Trevor Graham in June 2003 . Graham named the names of a number of athletes whom he accused of doping a then undetectable steroid, and named Victor Conte as the source of the steroid. As proof, he provided a syringe with traces of the steroid. A little later, Don Catlin , director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory in Los Angeles , succeeded in developing a test method for GHG using the sample . The new procedure retested 550 existing samples from athletes, with more than 20 positive results. Up until then, 16 anabolic steroids were checked, with THG being the 17th.

On September 3, 2003, officials from the Internal Revenue Service , the US Food and Drug Administration , the San Mateo Narcotics Task Force, and the United States Anti-Doping Agency raided BALCO's premises and found lists of BALCO customers. Containers were found in a sub-camp with labels indicating steroids and growth hormones. A search of Anderson's premises two days later revealed steroids, $ 60,000 cash, and lists of athletes' names and dosing schedules. On June 6, 2006, the home of baseball player Jason Grimsley (Arizona Diamondbacks) was searched. Grimsley provided information about players who had used performance enhancers. He received the notice from his club and was suspended for 50 games. The investigation into the doping scandal is still ongoing.

On the BALCO client list were the official findings that inter alia the professional baseball Barry Bonds , Benito Santiago , Cottrell J. Hunter , the British sprinter Dwain Chambers , Gary Sheffield , baseball pro Jason Giambi , the professional baseball Jeremy Giambi , the hammer thrower John McEwen , the Shot putters Kevin Toth , sprinters Marion Jones and Kelli White , middle-distance runner Regina Jacobs , sprinter Tim Montgomery , several basketball stars and members of the Oakland Raiders football club , including Bill Romanowski , Tyrone Wheatley , Barrett Robbins , Chris Cooper and Dana Stubblefield . Conte is also said to have been responsible for supplying the US Olympic judo team with "vitamins".

On July 15, 2005, Conte and Anderson were sentenced to partial fines, four months in prison and four months on probation . You were found guilty of illegally selling steroids to athletes and laundering money . With the early confessions, the defendants avoided a spectacular trial that would have started in October 2005.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams received the White House Correspondents' Association Journalism Award in April 2005 for their work . In 2006 they published the book Game of Shadows, which contains a summary of the approx. 200 interviews and 1000 documents that they had collected for their research in the context of the BALCO affair.

In October 2006, there was an investigation into Fainaru-Wada and Williams, because they had used a record of a secret testimony of Barry Bond before a grand jury . Since both authors refused to give the name of their informant, they faced a prison sentence of up to 18 months.

The investigation closed in February 2007 after attorney Troy Ellermann pleaded guilty to forwarding a copy of Bond's confession.

Because of their denial of involvement in the affair in the proceedings against the agents (agents) of the US Food and Drug Administration, preliminary investigations were conducted against numerous trainers and athletes and in some cases charges were brought. So were Marion Jones and her former coach Trevor Graham accused in the autumn of 2007. While Jones admitted the false statements before the trial, Graham denied any false statements in the early hearings. However, both were finally convicted of perjury in 2008.

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Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams: Barry Bonds: Anatomy of a scandal . In: San Francisco Chronicle . December 25, 2003
  2. ^ The THG scandal explained . In: BBC . February 24, 2004 ( bbc.co.uk [accessed September 10, 2016]).
  3. ↑ Juan Manuel Garcia Manso: La Fueza. Findamentatcion, Valoracion y Entrenamiento. Gymnos, Madrid 1999, p. 139.
  4. ↑ Maik Großekathöfer: Leak in the system . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40, October 2, 2006, p. 140
  5. ↑ Bob Egelko: Lawyer pleads guilty to leaking BALCO testimony: He agrees to plead guilty - prosecutors say they'll end effort to jail reporters . In: San Francisco Chronicle . February 14, 2007
  6. ↑ Amy Shipley: Marion Jones Admits to Steroid Use . In: The Washington Post . October 5, 2007
  7. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau of October 22, 2008: Court sentenced Graham to house arrest , accessed on June 18, 2012