Download Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, & the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports AudioBook Free
In the summertime 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 continued to hit 66 home runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Giants All-Star Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was possibly the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots in to the SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home runs at unprecedented rates. For a long time there had been rumors that perhaps many 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 your nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds was also implicated. Immediately the problem 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 largest doping scandal in the history of sports, and exactly how baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds of the SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Giants, came to utilize steroids. Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with a huge selection of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony, confidential documents, music 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 attempt to corrupt sports by giving athletes with “designer” steroids that might 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. Another narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an immensely talented, moody player who considered performance-enhancing drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run record in 1998. Through his fitness expert, Bonds gained access to BALCO drugs. Every one 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 span of the probe, and the baffling decision of federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who have been involved. Highlights of Game of Shadows include:
Barry Bonds
- A take a look at how Bonds was driven to utilize performance-enhancing drugs partly by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It had been shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing when compared to a protein shake from medical food store—first started using steroids.
- How Bonds’s weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to meet Victor Conte prior to the 2001 baseball season with...
