White: ‘I Knew It Was So Wrong’

Thinking back to what she had become during her golden summer, Kelli White cried, the tears tumbling hot and fast. One streamed down the left side of her face. She dabbed it with a tissue. She tried to find her breath.

“I can’t look at anything from last year. I hate it,” White said Thursday, describing how in the summer of 2003 she had sailed to victory in the 100- and 200-meter sprints at the U.S. and world championships, fueled by a steroid regimen that she said had been devised by BALCO founder Victor Conte. “You know what? I became somebody totally different. I wasn’t me.”

She paused, putting a hand over her face, searching for a measure of composure, resuming after a moment, “I knew it was so wrong. I hated having to do that.”

Fifteen months after a positive test for the stimulant modafinil at the 2003 world championships, seven months after accepting a two-year ban from competition for the use of banned performance-enhancing substances, White spoke publicly for the first time Thursday about how -- and why -- she did it, and why she turned to Conte.

U.S. anti-doping authorities, knowing she would be granting a joint interview to The Times, San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today, said Thursday her case illustrates a culture of doping that had enveloped track and field, and other sports, in this country in recent years.

“Her decision to cheat herself and her sport was deplorable,” USADA’s general counsel, Travis Tygart, said in a telephone interview. But maybe her coming clean, he said, will have a “positive and lasting impact.”

White tried to make the 2000 U.S. Olympic team but didn’t. The 2001 season went better. But after an injury-marred 2002 season, White said, she was tired of trying to eke out a living on the track and field circuit, of “nickel-and-dime-ing my way up the ladder.” Enough, she thought.

She’d grown up in the Bay Area, gone to high school in Union City. BALCO was in Burlingame, south of San Francisco. She’d been introduced to Conte a few years before by her longtime coach, Remi Korchemny.

In 2000, she said, she was given a substance that Conte had told her was flaxseed oil. She said Thursday that wasn’t so. It was THG. She tried it for a brief period, then stopped.

“I was under the belief at the time that it just really wasn’t necessary -- it wasn’t necessary. I believed that,” she said.

In March 2003, she went back to Conte, knowing full well what she was doing, even if she didn’t fully understand the potentially adverse health consequences of using steroids.

She said, “You see them sold on the Internet -- I thought, ‘OK, you can buy it. You don’t see cocaine sold on the Internet.’ ”

They agreed she would pay him $10,000. He would devise a regimen, laying out what to take and when in calendars he would mark specially for her.

She gave him a first installment of $5,000, in a check written that June from her personal bank account, she said. The rest was due at the end of the season, she said.

He had her take THG, called “the clear.” He told her to take a testosterone-based cream. He instructed her to take the blood-booster EPO, she said.

To take THG, a clear, yellow fluid, she would take a needle-less syringe and put a few drops under her tongue, she said. It tasted like a rubber band, she said.

The “cream,” as it was called, went on the inside of both elbows, she said. A little rubbing and it disappeared into the skin.

To take EPO, she said, required a shot -- an injection around her stomach. White said she gave herself her EPO shot once a week, on Wednesdays. “Doesn’t leave a bruise at all. No evidence at all,” she said.

She said she kept her own logs, in a black-covered day planner. She used smiley-faced stickers to denote what was what--orange for THG, yellow for “the cream,” red for EPO.

She also used purple smileys, to show when she was menstruating. Her calendars showed seven days straight of purple smileys, seven days off, for two solid months -- until Conte instructed her to dial down her use of THG.

Using steroids, she could train longer and harder. She bulked up, gained 15 pounds. She won, and kept winning. “The stuff was for real,” she said. “It was for real.”

But, she added, she came to hate how she looked and the moral compromise she had made.

“When you make this decision [to take steroids], you’ve got to take everything that comes with it,” she said. “If it meant getting bigger and bigger, that’s fine. But after a while, I didn’t look like myself anymore. That’s when I started separating myself, [separating] the person on the track from the person at home, the person I knew I was.”

At the world championships in Paris, she tested positive for the stimulant modafinil.

She hadn’t been sure about taking it. Korchemny had sought to assure her: “He said to me, in quotes, ‘Victor says he’s 110% sure you will not test positive for modafinil.’ That was what he told me.” She said she thought, “You know what, since I trust Victor so much, I’ll do this.”

That marked the beginning of the end.

Conte, Korchemny and two others face federal charges in San Francisco, accused of distributing steroids to elite athletes.

White hasn’t been training -- there’s nothing, at least now, to train for -- and her weight is back down, she said, to 120.

Her right knee still hurts from an old injury. But running is itself a drug of sorts, and she still harbors hope of competing again, though she’s already 27 and still has most of a long suspension to serve.

Asked whether she could have won without doping, she replied, “When I look back now, I have to say I honestly don’t think so. The level you have to train at to be that consistent is hard. When I come back now, I wouldn’t run as much. My goal is just to be competitive and not so much to win.

“I want to go back to the days when it was fun,” she said. “It became such a business.”