Not only is Victory Conte still in the sports nutrition racket, but he’s very comfortable with his notoriety, report the New York Daily News’ TJ Quinn and Terri Thompson.
There are two bowling ball-sized holes in the ground where the “BALCO” sign used to be, the blue one with the white bridge that was in the background of every television camera shot about the steroid scandal for three years.
“People were taking their pictures in front of it, giving the muscle pose,” Conte says, referring to the double-biceps pose he struck coming out of the Burton Federal Building in San Francisco in 2004. “It became another tourist site, like the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Somewhere there is a stigma about giving steroids to athletes and going to prison for it, but not in Conte’s circles.
“I was the prison celebrity,” he says. “I have people stop me in Home Depot and say, ‘Dude! Can I have your autograph?’ The girl in the checkout line in the grocery store said, ‘You’ve got a lot of courage.'”
“People need to look at themselves in the mirror and in the medicine cabinet,” he says. “They get boob jobs, nose jobs, butt jobs; they increase their performance between the sheets with Viagra, the top-selling drug in the world. We’re a performance-enhancing society. There’s been too much hate. It’s time for a change. It’s time to put the spotlight on Olympic body officials and the owners and the players’ union officials who allowed this system to develop.”