'I saw Jones inject herself': Balco founder makes startling claims

The man at the centre of drug allegations against top United States athletes has labelled the Olympics "a fraud" and says beating drug testers is "like stealing candy from a baby".

Victor Conte, founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), says he supplied American sprinter Marion Jones with the drugs, showed her how to use them and watched as she injected herself.

Conte, in an interview to screen in full today on ABC's 20/20, draws Jones into the biggest athletics doping scandal since Ben Johnson.

"After I instructed her how to do it and dialled it up, she did the injection with me sitting right there next to her, right in front of me," Conte is quoted on the United States television network's website. "Marion didn't like to inject in the stomach area ... She would do it in her quad. The front part of her leg."

Conte also names Jones' husband Tim Montgomery, the world 100m recordholder, and Kelli White, who confessed after being stripped of her world 800m title following a positive dope test.

Conte told ABC that doping was rampant in professional and Olympic sport, and getting around anti-doping rules "is like taking candy from a baby".

Conte is accused of designing the steroid THG specifically to beat dope tests.

The ABC said Conte claims to have supplied Jones from August 2000 to September 2001. The Sydney Olympics, where Jones won five medals, began on September 15, 2000.

It says Conte names the drugs as an undetectable substance called The Clear, the blood booster erythropoetin (EPO), human growth hormone, and insulin.

This year the San Francisco Chronicle said that Jones' former husband CJ Hunter had told federal investigators he personally injected Jones with banned performance-enhanced substances obtained from Balco.

Hunter, a shotputter, was banned in 2000 after positive steroid tests.

Greek coach Christos Tsekos and sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou have been linked to the scandal through Balco documents.

They have been charged with doping offences arising from the Athens Olympics, and the sprinters have been charged by police with faking a motorcycle accident to avoid drug testers.

Conte, Balco vice-president James Valente, athletics coach Remy Korchemny and Greg Anderson, personal trainer of baseball star Barry Bonds, face charges of steroid distribution. All have pleaded not guilty.

Conte gave his interview to ABC against the advice of his lawyers.

Lawyers for Jones told ABC she had never taken banned drugs and had passed a lie detector test. They said Conte was not credible.

After Hunter's claims became public, Jones' lawyers said he was motivated by bitterness.

According to ABC, Conte says there aren't accurate tests to detect the substances he claims Jones used.

"I have no bone to pick with Marion. I'm here today because I believe that the world needs to hear the truth ... so that we can really attempt collectively to try to genuinely create a level-playing field.

"It's almost like what I'm here to tell you right now is that not only is there no Santa Claus, but there's no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy either in the world of sport ...

"I mean the whole history of the Olympic Games is just full of corruption, cover-up, performance-enhancing drug use. It's not what the world thinks it is."

Conte claims he created and supplied the drugs for the challenge rather than the money.

He said he masterminded the doping plan that led to Montgomery's world 100m record and described the drug regime devised for White as "the most sophisticated in the history of the planet Earth".

Montgomery is the only person to have beaten the steroid-fuelled time Johnson ran at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

The only woman to have run faster than Jones for 100m is fellow American Florence Griffiths Joyner, also at Seoul, who was dogged by suspicion she doped.

White tells 20/20: "I felt that there [were] so many people doing it that I would just be like one of the others."

But she began to have concerns. "The acne thing was bad. The shoulders, the face, my voice changed ... I had a period every other week ... [Winning] got to be so easy that I was actually disappointed. And it - the guilt - was too much then."