Patrick Arnold sounds jaded. Bad Breaks
But then, it’s perhaps understandable: the designer steroids he either tweaked or invented between 1990 and 2002 are responsible for the biggest pro-sports shake-up in living memory. It was a scandal that felled the careers of at least 24 world- class athletes, including British sprinter Dwain Chambers and US baseball players, Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds. The resulting media fallout became known as the Balco scandal, named after the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, the California company that sold the drugs. Company records, censored court hearings and ongoing lawsuits suggest hundreds more athletes have since been drawn into the scandal, with disciplinary consequences still looming.
“The federal authorities have practically had crosshairs on my back since Balco,” he gripes. Arnold’s life came crashing down in 2005, when an amendment to the Controlled Substances Act decreed that prohormones – the basis of many of his creations, which encourage the production of testosterone – were illegal. Balco lost 60% of its sales. FBI agents raided the lab, effectively shutting the company down for good. And, as the architect of the entire spectacle, Arnold was sentenced to a three-month spell in a Virginia penitentiary.
Today, Arnold is pitching a comeback. Despite the reprimands and the penalties, he remains in possession of a keen knowledge of – and enthusiasm for – analytical chemistry. Now he is bringing new products to market under the guise of two new companies – Prototype Nutrition and E-pharm – with the rather less controversial aims of improving muscle memory and slowing the ageing process, among other ambitions. His intentions, he says, are good. The question is whether a man seen as the steroid-pushing orchestrator of the Balco scandal and a cancerous influence on competitive sport, will ever be regarded as anything more than a narcotics kingpin. 1984 – The Bay Area Laboratory Co- Operative (Balco) is founded by Victor Conte
1990 – Patrick Arnold graduates with a degree in chemistry from the University of New Haven, Connecticut
1990-1998 – Arnold embarks upon a career in the nutritional supplements industry, where he gains infamy as ‘ the father of prohormones’ – undetectable drugs that mimic testosterone
1998 – St Louis Cardinals’ star, Mark Mcgwire is caught using androstenedione – a prohormone introduced by Arnold that is banned by the NFL and Olympic Committee but not, at the time, by baseball regulators
1999 onward – Arnold takes androstenedione, to mass market
2000 – Conte contacts Arnold seeking new undetectable drugs. Arnold suggests norboletone, a steroid that was never sold due to fears around toxicity convinced of steroids’ inherent immorality.
One of the chief arguments against steroids is that they give those who take them an unfair advantage. Removing drugs from sport, the clean lobby argues, would create a ‘level playing field’, thus forming the basis of fair competition. According to Arnold, however, this equalopportunity arena has never existed. “Certain athletes and certain teams were performing entirely too well for this to have ever been a level playing field,” he claims, cryptically. But once Arnold’s products hit the market at the turn of the millennium, this gap only became more