In the summer of 1998 two of baseball leading sluggers, Mark McGwire and
Sammy Sosa, embarked on a race to break Babe Ruth's single season home
run record. The nation was transfixed as Sosa went on to hit 66 home
runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, San Francisco Giants All-Star
Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was
perhaps the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the
next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots into the
San Francisco Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home
runs at unprecedented rates. For years there had been rumors that
perhaps some of these players owed their success to steroids. But crowd
pleasing homers were big business, and sportswriters, fans, and
officials alike simply turned a blind eye. Then, in December of 2004,
after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle
reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a
federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO,
Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds
was also implicated. Immediately the issue of steroids became front page
news. The revelations led to Congressional hearings on baseball's drug
problems and continued to drive the effort to purge the U.S. Olympic
movement of drug cheats. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose for the
first time the secrets of the BALCO investigation that has turned the
sports world upside down.
Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That
Rocked Professional by award-winning investigative journalists Mark
Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is a riveting narrative about the
biggest doping scandal in the history of sports, and how baseball's home
run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, came to use steroids.
Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with
hundreds of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony,
confidential documents, audio recordings, and more, the authors provide,
for the first time, a definitive account of the shocking steroids
scandal that made headlines across the country.
The book traces the career of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO
laboratory, an egomaniacal former rock musician and self-proclaimed
nutritionist, who set out to corrupt sports by providing athletes with
"designer" steroids that would be undetectable on "state-of-the-art"
doping tests. Conte gave the undetectable drugs to 28 of the world's
greatest athletes--Olympians, NFL players and baseball stars, Bonds
chief among them.
A separate narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an
immensely talented, moody player who turned to performance-enhancing
drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run
record in 1998. Through his personal trainer, Bonds gained access to
BALCO drugs. All of the great athletes who visited BALCO benefited
tremendously--Bonds broke McGwire's record--but many had their careers
disrupted after federal investigators raided BALCO and indicted Conte.
The authors trace the course of the probe, and the baffling decision of
federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who were involved.
Highlights of Game of Shadows include:
Barry Bonds
- A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in
part by jealousy over Mark McGwire's record-breaking 1998 season. It
was shortly thereafter that Bonds--who had never used anything more
performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food
store--first began using steroids.
- How Bonds's weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to
meet Victor Conte before the 2001 baseball season with...
