Doping-money at heart of athletics coverup says former-BALCO chief (Reuters)
(Reuters) – Victor Conte, the man at the center of what was the United States’ biggest doping scandal, believes the latest drug scandal to rock the sports world is all part of a coverup to protect the bottom line. Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper and Germany’s ARD/WDR broadcaster said they had obtained secret data from global athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, showing endurance runners suspected of doping have been winning a third of Olympic and world championship medals. Conte, who ran a little Bay Area laboratory called BALCO on the outskirts of San Francisco that became the epicenter of a massive doping scandal in the early 2000s, said the reports show a lack of genuine interest by world sport’s anti-doping chiefs to catch cheaters and smacks of a coverup to protect financial interests.