Michelle Li, 4/2 Week 14 - BALCO

Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, dubbed "the world's fastest couple." Source: USA Today

From the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece to this year’s March Madness tournament, humanity has always been obsessed with sports. Its appeal isn’t just limited to its entertainment factor; there’s something inspiring about how only the most hardworking, dedicated, and passionate athletes can win.

Or, alternatively, the athletes with the best drugs can win. Despite strict bans, there have been tons of doping cases in professional sports. One significant instance of this would be the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal.

BALCO was founded in 1984 by Victor Conte, a college dropout. Though he lacked formal education, Conte was convinced that he had cracked the code to maximum athletic performance: balancing mineral levels in the human body. He crafted a business plan to provide these services to athletes for free in exchange for them wearing BALCO merchandise at major sporting events. With this exposure, he could sell ZMA, a mineral-balancing product, to the masses and guarantee a stable income. But his first few tries with this plan failed; the athletes Conte selected didn’t perform well enough to receive media attention and thus couldn’t bring BALCO to a mainstream audience.

So, Conte teamed up with two other experts to create specialized schedules for athletes to take steroids. These specific guides ensured that one drug’s side effects would be counteracted or masked by another, allowing doping to go undetected even in Major League Baseball and the Olympics. 

In 2003, the United States Anti-Doping Agency received an anonymous tip on Conte attached to a syringe containing “The Clear,” an unknown substance. When sent to lab director Don Catlin, he discovered it to be a powerful steroid, and the ensuing investigation into BALCO exposed countless athletes for cheating—most notably SF Giants star Barry Bonds and Olympic track and field gold medalist Marion Jones. Using “The Clear” and an unhealthy amount of other steroids, Bonds achieved some of the highest statistics in baseball as Jones won five medals at the 2000 Olympic Games. Their work and drive was overshadowed by their doping, however, once news about BALCO broke. 

I’m not defending their actions. Cheating is cheating, and their steroid usage undoubtedly took away from other athletes that had reached the top fairly. But Bonds had spent years watching his rivals use steroids to accomplish athletic feats before giving in to the pressure of following his father’s legacy. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jones was in two high-profile relationships with track and field athletes C.J. Hunter and Tim Montgomery, both of whom found success through steroid usage.

Now, two decades later, they have embedded themselves in America’s collective consciousness as not some of the greatest athletes of all time, but instead as cheaters. Their legacies are forever tainted in our memory. Hardly anyone stops and thinks about how in the sports world, it’s either use steroids or lose—and far too many athletes have selected the first option.