The Truth About Barry Bonds And Steroids

But the source of Barry Bonds's newfound power wasn't God at all. It was growth hormone and Greg Anderson. And now new drugs known as the Cream and the Clear.

After the 2000 season ended, Anderson had wanted someone to introduce him to Victor Conte. Conte was the owner of a once-failing business that finally seemed to have turned a corner, thanks largely to sales of ZMA, a legal supplement that was of dubious value but was endorsed by several prominent athletes in exchange for the highly effective--though illegal--performance- enhancing drugs Conte provided by way of his network of sophisticated chemists and suppliers. The gross income of Conte's company in 2000, according to court records, was $1.18 million, up from $42,820 two years earlier. BALCO was around the corner from World Gym in Burlingame, where Anderson spent virtually every waking hour and where he trained Bonds. Anderson had learned of Conte's reputation as an innovator in the business of performance-enhancing drugs.

The publicity machine was gearing up for Conte and his company, and he had it figured out. He would encourage elite athletes to wear ZMA T-shirts and hats and talk up his supplement to the bodybuilding magazines. In exchange he would help them reach new levels of success, setting up an elaborate system to ensure that his athletes could obtain and use effective performance-enhancing drugs without fear of getting caught. His regular clients at the time included several elite track and field athletes and NFL All-Pro linebacker Bill Romanowski, among others.

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.

Now Bonds could insist that he built his muscular body with intense weight training and the modern science of nutritional supplementation. In baseball, a sport that didn't even test for drugs, the cover story seemed good enough to protect the reputation of Bonds, the Giants and the game itself. Like all good cover stories, it contained some truth.

There was no question Bonds had worked brutally hard in the gym in the off-season. Later, Conte and Anderson would persuade Bonds to plug BALCO and ZMA in a feature story and photo spread in Muscle & Fitness, the bodybuilding magazine. Conte also put Bonds through a battery of blood and urine panels. According to the pseudoscience used to shill for BALCO's legal products, to obtain maximum athletic performance it was important to remedy minute deficiencies of zinc and magnesium with supplements, starting with ZMA. Bonds's own doctor drew his blood, which Anderson transported for testing. In July 2002, Bonds allowed a writer for The New York Times Magazine to observe his weight training. That story portrayed Anderson as more of a nutritional technician than a tattooed gym rat.