VICTOR CONTE, the central figure in the Balco steroids scandal in California, has been scheduled for sentencing on October 18 after prosecutors in the United States urged a federal judge to accept a plea bargain for him to be given an eight-month term. Under the deal, Conte would serve four months in prison and four months confined to home.

In the latest development in San Francisco on Monday, prosecutors told Susan Illston, the district judge, that Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) in Burlingame, should serve eight months for his lead role in supplying drugs to international sportsmen and women.

The proposed punishment period was agreed between the prosecution and Conte in July. Dwain Chambers, Great Britain’s European 100 metres champion, was among several leading competitors from a number of sports who were implicated in the scandal, which came to light in 2003. Chambers has begun training for a comeback after his two-year ban ends next month.

The Balco case developed into one of the most widely publicised sporting drugs scandals in history. In filing to the court, Matthew A. Parrella, one of the prosecutors, wrote that “sentencing a first-time offender, such as the defendant, to actual prison time . . . sends a significant and important message of deterrence”.

The prosecutors told Illston that steroid sentencing laws in the US were weak and that some of the substances that Conte and his co-defendants were distributing became illegal only after the case was brought last year. Among the co-defendants is Remi Korchemny, a Ukrainian who was Chambers’s coach at the time. Korchemny, along with James Valente, the Balco vice-president, and Greg Anderson, the trainer to Barry Bonds, the baseball player, have pleaded guilty to lesser charges. They are expected to receive lighter sentences, short of a jail term, at the same hearing as Conte.

Bonds has been under a cloud of suspicion since being implicated in the scandal, as has Marion Jones, the triple Olympic sprint gold medalwinner at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, although neither has admitted steroid use. Jones’s form has nosedived in the past two years and she failed to qualify for the World Championships in the summer.