Carl Lewis and Victor Conte are two prominent personalities who have been engaged in running – the former running on the athletic track, the latter running a steroid ring. These two ‘runners’ suspect sprint superstar Usain Bolt’s performance at the recently concluded Beijing Olympics could not only be due to his diet of homemade yams but to steroids and other performance enhancers as well.

From Times Online:

It has been a Jamaican love-in since Usain Bolt bestrode the Olympic Games and won a hat-trick of gold medals, but a voice from the past urged caution as the new sprint sensation was heralded as the king of Kingston. With Bolt in the throes of a national party after his homecoming this week, Carl Lewis said that his achievements are questionable.

The American, 47, who won nine Olympic golds, stopped short of accusing Bolt of doping, but his remarks were the most damning yet from a track insider. In an incendiary interview in Sports Illustrated, Lewis said: “When people ask me about Bolt I say he could be the greatest athlete of all time. But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don’t question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you’re a fool. Period.”

Conte has recently expressed his misgivings about the impressive performance of athletes coming from the Caribbean countries like Jamaica. Conte’s suspicion is based on the fact that these countries lack or have inadequate testing programs for steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. This is also the basis of Lewis’ skepticism; that unlike the United States, Jamaica has humungous task ahead regarding its anti-doping policy.

“I’m proud of America right now because we have the best random and most comprehensive drug-testing program. Countries like Jamaica do not have a random program, so they can go months without being tested. No one is accusing Bolt, but don’t live by a different rule and expect the same kind of respect. How dare anybody feel that there shouldn’t be scrutiny, especially in our sport?”

Understandably, Lewis’ comments has raised some hackles in Bolt’s country, particularly Herb Elliot, Jamaica team doctor and a member of the IAAF antidoping commission. Elliot stated that the US was circulating “condescending crap” at the Olympics. “They still think we don’t know anything down in Jamaica,” he said.

In 2003, Lewis was one of the athletes whose names appeared in the documents provided by Dr. Wade Exum to Sports Illustrated. Exum was the United States Olympic Committee from 1991 to 2000.

The American athletes, numbering to about 100, failed anti-doping screenings and should have been disqualified from participating in the Olympics but were nevertheless got clearance to compete. The documents said Lewis tested positive three times prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics for three banned stimulants – pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and phenylpropanolamine. He was banned from said Olympics and was suspended for six months. Lewis denied he consciously used the banned substances, a claim which USOC had believed and prompted them to clear Lewis for future competitions.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Tags: Carl Lewis, drug testing program, Jamaica, lack of random testing in Jamaica, steroid ring, Usain Bolt, Victor Conte

Posted in Steroids and Anabolic Steroids, Steroids in Olympics, Steroids in Sports, steroid nation | No Comments/Questions

The upcoming intense presidential election is one of the reasons why Victor Conte’s book is not telling anything until 2009. Another intervention is Shane Mosley’s legal offensive against the former BALCO chief.

From the New York Daily News:

Nasty legal warfare has broken out over Victor Conte’s forthcoming tell-all book about his leading role in the world’s biggest steroid conspiracy.

Among the factors is an expensive barrage of defamation litigation launched against Conte by boxer Shane Mosley, one of the athletes whose BALCO doping regimens Conte promises to describe in detail, and Mosley’s threats to sue the book’s publisher.

Conte admits that Mosley’s defamation suits are a “distraction”. According to Conte, he has devoted anecdotal reports on Mosley regarding the boxer’s used of performance-enhancing drugs in Straight Dope. Conte says that Mosley knew “exactly and precisely what he was doing” and had used both “the cream” and “the clear”, both designer drugs then. Mosley, however, claims that he thought the products he was supplied with by BALCO were legal.

Mosley is represented by the notorious New York attorney Judd Burstein.

The most recent of Burstein’s actions against Conte is a motion filed Wednesday asking a U.S. District Court in California to sanction Conte’s defense attorney for submitting what Burstein called an “outrageous and entirely frivolous” motion to recover $75,654 in attorney fees from a defamation suit that Burstein initiated and withdrew.

Burstein rejected Lyons’ overtures. He has promised to sue Skyhorse and its insurers.

In early August, Mosley’s camp filed a $12 million defamation suit in a New York state court while pulling out a similar complaint in a federal court in San Francisco.

Conte’s attorney, James Wagstaffe, had argued that federal claim violated California’s anti-SLAPP statutes. A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation is a lawsuit or a threat of lawsuit that is intended to intimidate and silence critics by encumbering them with the cost of a legal defense thereby inhibiting their criticism or opposition.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Tags: “BALCO: The Straight Dope on Barry Bonds, “the clear”, “the cream”, BALCO, defamation suit against Conte, Marion Jones and What We Can Do To Save Sports", PEDs, Shane Mosley, steroids, Victor Conte

Posted in Steroid Cycles, Steroids and Anabolic Steroids, Steroids in Baseball, Steroids in Boxing, Steroids in MMA, Steroids in NFL, Steroids in Olympics, Steroids in Sports, Steroids in UFC, buy steroids, steroid nation | No Comments/Questions

Former BALCO boss Victor Conte has hinted in his letter to the New York Daily News that the sporting world should take a closer look on athletes originating from the Caribbean. Conte says that countries like Jamaica and other Caribbean nations do not have independent anti-doping federations and practice “minimal offseason testing” and, therefore, are of suspect of using steroids. An excerpt from Conte’s letter:

I have no evidence of doping by any of the winners of medals in Beijing, but when times begin falling like rain, questions arise, especially when the record-setters are from countries such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations….

Conte mentions that in the women’s 100-meter event four of the eight finalists were from the region and Jamaican athletes took the 1-2-3 places in said event with Shelly-Ann Fraser taking home the gold.

He also mentions Jamaica’s Usain Bolt and Trinidad and Tobago’s Richard Thompson who won the gold and silver medal in the 100 meters respectively. Conte describes Bolt’s victory as “a shocking world-record time of 9.69, which is almost unbelievable since he shut it down before the finish line.”

Conte might know the top-secret protocol of doping; however, could he be totally right to hint that these personalities should be under a cloud of suspicion, as he puts it, because of possible use of performance-enhancing drugs?

In the ongoing Olympics, it’s obvious that the track is being dominated by athletes of African ancestry. And if you’re going to mention preeminent figures in Olympic sprinting and running events you’re going to come up with names like Marion Jones, Michael Johnson, Khalid Khannouchi, Donovan Bailey and Maurice Greene. These athletes have one common denominator – their ancestral origin is Africa.

Jon Entine in his The Story Behind the Amazing Success of Black Athletes offers an explanation to this phenomenon and it is not, in any way, connected with steroids.

Genetically linked, highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, lung capacity, and the ability to use energy more efficiently are not evenly distributed among populations and cannot be explained by known environmental factors.

Although scientists are just beginning to isolate the genetic links to those biologically-based differences, it is indisputable that they exist. Each sport demands a slightly different mix of biomechanical, anaerobic, and aerobic abilities. Athletes from each region of the world tend to excel in specific events as a result of evolutionary adaptations to extremely different environments that became encoded in the genes.

Genes, it seems, play major role in on one’s athletic performance. This is why, the article says, whites of European ancestry dominate sports like weightlifting, wrestling, shot-put and hammer. People of this race have “on average, more natural upper-body strength” because they have the mesomorphic body type which such events require - large and muscular, particularly in the upper of the body, with relatively short arms and legs and thick torsos.

This body structure is proving to be an advantage in sports where strength rather than speed is the winning asset.”

East Asians, on the other hand, are a presence in diving, gymnastics and figure skating because they tend to be small and more flexible.

On black athletes Entine says that “there are a range of structural traits shared by genetically-diverse African athletes: low body fat, longer legs in comparison to the rest of their bodies, and narrow hips.”

Here are some of the characteristics enumerated by Entine that explain why black athletes, particularly of West African descent, monopolize the Olympic track today.

•    relatively less subcutaneous fat on arms and legs and proportionately more lean body and muscle mass, broader shoulders, larger quadriceps, and bigger, more developed musculature in general;
•    denser, shallower chests;
•    higher center of gravity, generally shorter sitting height, narrower hips, and lighter calves;
•    longer arm span and “distal elongation of segments” - the hand is relatively longer than the forearm, which in turn is relatively longer than the upper arm; the foot is relatively longer than the tibia (leg), which is relatively longer than the thigh;
•    a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscles and more anaerobic enzymes, which can translate into more explosive energy.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Tags: black athletes, Caribbean, doping tests, genetics, genetics role in athletic performance, Jon Entine, steroids, The Story Behind the Amazing Success of Black Athletes, track athletes, Victor Conte

Posted in Steroids and Anabolic Steroids, Steroids in Baseball, Steroids in Olympics, Steroids in Sports, steroid nation | No Comments/Questions

To Victor Conte, the Caribbean is not only great for doing some R and R, but for doping as well.

In his letter to the New York Daily News, the former big boss of BALCO is giving out unsolicited advice for anti-doping organizations to step up their testing policies. And we’re sure Conte meant well and definitely knows what he’s talking about. He is a reformed man since he has spent some time in prison and then some more time on house arrest, we think any man would have the opportunity to turn over a new leaf under those circumstances. And for masterminding the biggest steroid scandal in history, we are sure he knows the ins and outs of steroid use.

Apparently, Mr. Conte is so concerned with the problem of doping in sports that he met with the former WADA boss Dick Pound in December 2007. Then, Conte has stressed the importance of implementing more out-of-competition testing to curb the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

On said meeting, Conte said he advised Pound to deploy “disguised testers” to Jamaica, providing WADA with details about a certain drug supplier there. Conte pointed out to Pound the futility of undertaking testing at competitions saying that it is during the offseason period that PEDs are widely used “when athletes use anabolic steroids in conjunction with intensive weight training and develop the explosive strength base that serves them throughout the competitive season”.

Pound, however, stepped down two weeks after the meeting, according to Conte, and the organization “failed to act upon the information.”

As for the ongoing Games in Beijing, Conte has this to say:

I have no evidence of doping by any of the winners of medals in Beijing, but when times begin falling like rain, questions arise, especially when the record-setters are from countries such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations where there is no independent anti-doping federation. In the women’s 100 meters, for instance, four of the eight finalists in the event were from such countries. Jamaican women swept all three Olympic medals: Shelly-Ann Frasier’s winning time of 10.78 seconds is blazing fast, and reflects a drop from a best of 11.31 in 2007 to 10.78 in 2008, an improvement of more than five-tenths of a second in a single year and about five meters faster than before.

In the letter, Conte also talks about Usain Bolt, who won the men’s 100-meter gold medal and whose triumph Conte considers as “a shocking world-record time of 9.69.” Trinidad and Tobago’s Richard Thompson also merited a special mention in Conte’s letter.  Thompson won the silver in same event in a personal best time of 9.89.

Conte says that that something is going on considering that five out eight finalists in the men’s 100-m race were from an area “where there is minimal out-of-season testing and five-of-six 100-meter medals were won by athletes from Caribbean countries without independent anti-doping federations”. Conte, however, reiterates that he has no knowledge that said athletes were involved in illegal activity. He says: “All I know is that they and other athletes come from regions where minimal offseason testing is administered.”

Conte’s ends his appeal with these statements:

There is a desperate need for each of the Caribbean countries to have an independent and fully functioning anti-doping federation. Until that is the case, the sprinters from these countries are going to continue to be under a cloud of suspicion.

I believe that these athletes need to be frequently drug tested on a random basis during the offseason, so that the cloud of suspicion can begin to move on. It’s my opinion that more effective drug testing in the Caribbean will help to restore the credibility of entire sport of track and field.

Bookmark It