Victor Conte on Sports Doping

Here’s a fascinating video from Business Insider that I came across featuring Victor Conte, founder and president of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). BALCO, you might recall, was a major player in MLB’s steroid scandal of the early-2000s. In this video, Conte talks openly about his role in the distribution of performance-enhancing substances, his thoughts on how pervasive doping has become in sports, and his thoughts about who is impacted by it all. The video focuses primarily on track and field and the Olympics, but I find it fascinating to see how this all is able to happen in general, and as the video shows, how the pressures across all sports might persuade an athlete to participate in drug use that they might not otherwise consider.