Here's some interesting news out of the Bay Area this morning:
San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds obtained the steroid Winstrol from BALCO founder Victor Conte, track star Tim Montgomery told a federal grand jury last year.Montgomery's testimony about Bonds is secondhand, a recounting of what Montgomery said Conte told him when the track star visited the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in Burlingame in 2000 or 2001.
But Montgomery's claim that Bonds got banned substances at BALCO is corroborated by a statement that federal authorities say Conte himself made during a raid on the lab last year.
As a result of his testimony regarding his own steroids use, Montgomery is facing a lifetime ban from competition at the behest of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
The article further states that Bonds sought these drugs because of his concerns about the random testing that Major League Baseball instituted at the start of the 2003 season. Apparently, the steroids Bonds reportedly obtained, are not detectable using current testing methods.
On some days, Bonds seems like the greatest player in the history of the game. On others, it seems like he might wreck it. This is one of those days.
THG actually is detectable now — it wasn’t at the time. The anti-doping lab at UCLA developed a test after a tipster handed in a syringe with trace amounts of the stuff last summer.
It’s creating a huge scandal in track and field because as many as 15 athletes (mostly but not all U.S., not all of them any good) may have been on it. Five already have been banned.
Baseball, of course, simply doesn’t care about this, so I guess there’s no scandal.