Conte Details Giving Jones Drugs Before 2000 Olympics

BALCO founder Victor Conte, in a magazine account that adds extensive detail to allegations he made Friday on a television newsmagazine show, says he provided track and field star Marion Jones with an array of banned drugs before the 2000 Sydney Games, where she won five medals, three of them gold.

Beginning in August 2000, six weeks before the Sydney Olympics, Conte said he arranged for Jones to receive the designer steroid THG as well as human growth hormone, the blood-booster EPO and insulin, according to an account in ESPN the Magazine.

“She was on all of it at the 2000 Games in Sydney, when she won three gold medals and two bronzes,” he wrote. “I tell you this knowing Marion passed a lie-detector test saying it’s not true. All that shows me is lie detectors don’t work.”

In an interview that aired Friday night on ABC’s “20/20,” Conte, asked whether Jones was a “drugs cheat,” replied, “Without a doubt.”

Jones issued a statement that said Conte’s allegations “are not true, and the truth will come out in the appropriate forum.” It also said, “I have instructed my lawyers to vigorously explore a defamation lawsuit against Victor Conte.”

Conte’s allegations immediately drew the attention of International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency officials.

WADA President Dick Pound said Jones’ medals ought to be stripped if Conte is telling the truth.

IOC President Jacques Rogge, appearing Friday at a meeting in Croatia, said, “I hope the truth will emerge. We want the truth. We want to know what happened and the more we know the better.”

Conte and three others, including Greg Anderson, personal trainer for San Francisco Giants’ slugger Barry Bonds, stand accused by federal prosecutors in San Francisco of multiple felony counts. Each has pleaded not guilty.

Conte’s first-person account in ESPN the Magazine is rich with detail.

On April 21, 2001, in an Embassy Suites hotel room in Covina, he said, he was sitting about “a foot away” as Jones used a $1,000 NovoPen injector -- a device that “looked like a Sharpie” and that can be used to inject human growth hormone. After pulling the spandex of her bicycle shorts above her right thigh, he said, Jones “dialed up a dose of 4 1/2 units of growth hormone and injected it into her quadriceps.”

Jones’ former husband, C.J. Hunter, “was hugely responsible for making sure she did what she was supposed to,” he said, adding that after they split up, “I had to reprimand her for getting careless.”

She left a growth-hormone cartridge injector “on a refrigerator in a hotel room in Edmonton ... and had to go back and get it,” Conte said. “[She] left it again at a hotel in Eugene, Ore., a few days later. After the first time she forgot it, she said she’d put it in a sneaker and lean the sneaker against the refrigerator so she wouldn’t forget it. Then she forgot the shoe. That injector had a thousand dollars worth of growth hormone in it!”

“I couldn’t afford the risk,” Conte said. At the same time, he said, he was having “financial problems” with Tim Montgomery, so he ended his relationship with them, and “soon I was working with their rivals.”

Montgomery and Jones are now partners and parents of a year-old son. The magazine story confirms previously published accounts of what was called “Project World Record” on Montgomery’s behalf, Conte acting as Montgomery’s “pharmacology and nutrition” guru. Montgomery set the 100-meter world record, 9.78 seconds, in 2002.

The magazine story draws careful distinctions in Conte’s descriptions of what he knew -- and did not know -- about the issue of whether Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs.

According to a story published Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bonds, testifying before a federal grand jury, said he used a clear substance and a cream supplied by BALCO but never thought the substances were steroids.

In ESPN the Magazine, Conte said, “I’ve talked to Barry Bonds about nutrition. [New York Yankee slugger] Gary Sheffield too, who Greg Anderson brought in to see me. But not only have I never given either of them a performance-enhancing drug, I’ve never even discussed the topic with them.

“Now, did Barry’s trainer, Greg Anderson, ever get ‘the clear’ and ‘the cream’ from me?” Conte said, using code names for THG and for a testosterone-based skin cream. “Yes, he did. On about half a dozen occasions, I gave him some. There were never any questions. We never discussed who it was for. I assumed it was for Greg, OK?”