"BALCO founder Victor Conte, who supports new testing agency, to speak about PED use in boxing and MMA

BY TERI THOMPSON

For the last several months, BALCO founder Victor Conte has been telling the world that boxing and mixed martial arts are rife with performance-enhancing drug abuse and are lightly regulated - if they're regulated at all - by the state agencies that are supposed to police them.

Next Saturday, Conte, who advocates clean performance and supports a new testing agency called the Voluntary Anti-doping Association (VADA) that uses carbon isotope ratio (CIR) testing in an effort to detect the use of synthetic testosterone (the boxers Andre Berto and Lamont Peterson have already been caught) Conte says permeates sports, will speak at the Association of Ringside Physicians 2012 Annual Medical Seminar at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis.

Conte's topic: Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Combat Sports.

The talk comes a few days after the FBI returned two boxes containing four cell phones, many legal documents, address books and a fax machine to Conte, whose home was raided on Jan. 25, 2005 by a SWAT team because authorities mistakenly believed Conte had leaked grand jury information about the government's steroid investigation to the San Francisco Chronicle. Conte, who spent four months in jail in late 2005 on conspiracy to distribute steroid charges, was not the leak: That turned out to be his former defense attorney, Troy Ellerman, who pleaded guilty to the crime in 2007 and served time in prison.

"Needless to say," Conte says, "I received no apology from the authorities for having been forced to defend myself against those false allegations."

Conte, who is sure to talk about CIR testing at the conference, continues to say that most of sports' testing programs, including Major League Baseball's, the NFL's and the Olympics, are easy for players to circumvent. Conte was the man who developed undetectable designer steroids more than a decade ago - including "The Clear" and "The Cream" - but he now says he believes most athletes simply use low-dose testosterone creams that they rub on their hands or under their arms rather than fancy potions that can cause positive tests. The "trans-dermal" creams as they're known, clear the system in six-to-eight hours and don't breach the 4-to-1 testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio that triggers a positive test under most programs.As the Olympics approach, look for the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) to start paying attention by asking testing agencies to use the carbon isotope ratio to determine who's cheating."