It is startling to think that the only man who may be able to save athletics from death by a thousand cut corners is the same man who spent four months in jail after years of killing it. Now Victor Conte, who was behind the most notorious doping operation in sport, is ready to help to mend the self-inflicted wounds.

Dick Pound, the chairman of the World AntiDoping Agency (Wada), told The Times that he is prepared to work with Conte, who is running a business called Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Coaching from the same Californian building where his Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative descended into infamy. From Balco to SNAC, the acronyms and approach have changed, but the acrimonious fallout goes on.

Nevertheless, Pound said: “I’d be interested to talk to him to see if he can help us. Any information is welcome.”

Conte has lots and his views on “rampant” doping, high-level cover-ups and the risks athletes are prepared to take chime like a death knell. He also accused the IOC of not wanting the truth to emerge and called for world records set before 1990 to be scrapped. “The Olympics are a fraud and they always have been,” he said.

He was speaking after Marion Jones’s tear-stained exit from athletics in a courtroom in New York last week. Jones sued Conte for $25 million during her days of denial, but Conte sympathises because of his wider scepticism and will not dismiss her as a performance-enhanced dreg. “Doping is rampant and beating the testers is like taking candy from a baby,” he said. “The system is inept. There is a level playing field – it’s just not the one people want.”

He estimated that, as well as Jones, a further 5,000 athletes at the Sydney Olympics took drugs. Yet at the recent World Championships there was not one positive test out of 1,132. Progress or evidence of more efficient cheats? Certainly, the possibility of Jones’s 100 metres gold medal being given to Ekaterini Thanou, the Greece runner who won the silver in 2000 but was involved in the scandal of the 2004 Games in Athens when she was accused of staging a motorcycle crash to avoid a drugs test, is hugely embarrassing. “That is a very awkward situation for the IOC and they may just decide to keep the medal,” Pound said.

Conte has little faith in the IOC and says that the endemic problem in athletics is a refusal to accept a harsh reality. “The IOC does not want to face the truth because there is too much money riding on it,” he said. “It comes down to dollars. The Olympics are marketed as this elite competition and nobody wants to admit it’s all false.”

He recounted the story of how he became aware of doping when a client failed a drugs test in 1992. “I got a call from someone high up in the TAC [The Athletics Congress, predecessor of USA Track & Field] and he told me they’d decided to cover it up,” he said. “International governing bodies are still happy to look the other way.”

The motivation for drug-taking is the same the world over and the present is blighted by the tawdry past. “Florence Griffith Joyner set the 100 metres and 200 metres world records in 1988, when there was no random out-of-competition testing,” Conte said. “Look at the women’s 400 metres and the 800 metres, too – those records go back even earlier.”

As with Joyner, Marita Koch’s and Jarmila Kratochvilova’s achievements were tainted by suspicion. “Athletes will do anything because their aim is GOAT – they want to be the Greatest Of All Time, but they are competing against a time when anything went. There was a completely different set of rules in Flo-Jo’s day.”

Joyner died from an epileptic seizure at the age of 38, but Conte believes even an early demise is no deterrent, informing his view that the IAAF’s hope of doubling the doping ban to four years at next month’s Wada conference is an irrelevance. “I know of a study where they asked elite athletes if they could win a gold medal but would be dead five years afterwards, would they take it? Eighty per cent said yes,” Conte said. “That’s what it means. What the IAAF should do is spend more time testing the top 50 athletes in the world, not ones lower down who are never going to get a lane [at a major meeting].”

Pound insists that it is a change of ethos that is needed. “Marion Jones deserves no sympathy,” he said. “The paper trail led back to her and she has been systematically lying for years. She is responsible for the suspicion now on every other athlete.”

When Pound leaves Wada this year, he can be proud of setting up the World AntiDoping Code in 2003, which set out a uniform list of banned substances, but listen to Conte and the code sounds more like a menu.

“Let’s say there’s an athlete from the Bahamas, for example, who needs to be tested twice a year by the IAAF to qualify for his prize-money,” he said. “He goes to a meeting in Europe, gets tested and then goes home, where he can take as many drugs as he wants from October to April. That’s a loophole you can drive a freight train through. There were more than 200 countries at the last Olympics and 24 had their own antidoping federation.”

The flip side to better testing is the advancement of the dark arts. “EPO [erythropoietin] clears the system in a day,” Conte said. “It’s sophisticated now and athletes don’t have to get their drugs from car parks and back alleys.”

Missed tests? “An easy duck and dive. You wait until one drops off after 18 months and then you’re free to miss another. It’s a simple dodge. I want to know why the IAAF does not name those who miss tests. Where’s the transparency?”

Pound has also called for transparency, but in his recent book, Inside Dope, he painted a murky picture in the lead-up to next year’s Beijing Games. “Many are concerned that the run-up to the 2008 Olympics puts Chinese athletes at even greater risk, especially when it has been revealed that some of the leading coaches working in China today are former East German coaches,” he said.

Conte, meanwhile, points out that, despite the jail sentence, the covert cheating and a brazenness about his past, he has always told the truth. If it heals as well as it hurts, then it will be worth Pound making the call.

Testing times

- A former musician, Victor Conte, once played bass guitar in the American soul band Tower of Power. “I was one of the few band members who wasn’t taking drugs,” he said.

- An amateur scientist, he invested in a business detecting minerals in the blood and later set up the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (Balco), which developed tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a designer steroid also known as “the clear”.

- Clients included Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones and Dwain Chambers. The Balco scandal broke in 2003, when Trevor Graham, Jones’s former coach, sent a syringe of THG to the US AntiDoping Agency.

- Sentenced to four months in jail in 2005 after pleading guilty to supplying steroids and money laundering. Montgomery, Chambers and Kelli White among those charged with doping offences as a result of the Balco investigation. Barry Bonds, the baseball legend, also implicated, although denied knowingly taking “the clear”.

- Jones launched a $25 million lawsuit after Conte claimed that he had seen Jones inject herself with human growth hormone. Last week she admitted to taking “the clear”.

- Conte now runs SNAC and says that he would only change what he did because of the hurt it caused his family.