Up in Ontario

A Review of Steriods in Baseball

The NY Times has an excellent review of Game of Shadows:

Drawing upon coded doping calendars kept by Victor Conte Jr., the head of Balco, and Greg Anderson, Mr. Bonds's trainer, the book gives the reader minutely detailed accounts of the drug regimens supposedly followed by athletes intent on beating the system, be it stringent Olympic tests or the far laxer rules of Major League Baseball (which began testing for steroids only in 2003). It traces the efforts of the United States Anti-Doping Agency to enforce Olympic anti-doping rules while examining the relationship of elite track-and-field athletes like the gold medalist Marion Jones with Balco. And it provides colorful portraits of Mr. Conte, a fast-talking, self-promoting former musician who reinvented himself as a steroids dealer, and the big-time athletes who bought his cynical proposition: "Cheat or lose."

According to Mr. Williams and Mr. Fainaru-Wada, Mr. Bonds (who has testified that he did not know what he was taking at the time) turned to steroids after watching Mr. McGwire shatter Roger Maris's home-run record in 1998. "Barry Bonds was astounded and aggrieved by the outpouring of hero worship for McGwire, a hitter whom he regarded as obviously inferior to himself," they write, adding that Mr. Bonds "had been around enough gyms to recognize that McGwire was a juicer."

With the help of Mr. Anderson and Mr. Conte, the authors contend, Mr. Bonds would go on to ingest an astonishing array of substances over the years, including Winstrol, Deca-Durabolin, human growth hormone, insulin, testosterone decanoate, trenbolone ("a steroid created to improve the muscle quality of beef cattle"), Clomid (usually prescribed to women for infertility) and "two undetectable steroids" known as The Clear and The Cream.

In short order, Mr. Bonds transformed his physique: by 2001, the authors write, he "looked like a WWE wrestler or a toy superhuman action figure." And he managed this transformation in his mid-30's, at an age when most players (like his father, Bobby) were gone from the game or in decline.

Will anyone ever look at the NFL and performance enhancing drugs, or am I dreaming in technicolour?