Walking In Wuhan

Ever since the summer of 2005 when I covered a steroid trial as an intern, I've been interested in how the steroids work and how athletes and bodybuilders went from injecting themselves with medicines designed for horses to designer steroids that enter and exit the system within a few hours.


With that in mind, I picked up Steroid Nation by Shaun Assael, a reporter for ESPN The Magazine who gives a very detailed – though sometimes hard to follow – narrative of how steroids went from being relegated to Venice Beach gyms to high school weight rooms across the country. Assael takes readers through the spread of the drugs with precise details gleaned from interviews with all the big players in the industry. He talks about Lyle Alzado – who came forward as a user before his death – the rise of companies like EAS, creatine, Andro and the people who try to catch doping athletes.

At times, the book felt like Assael performed a 300-plus page notebook dump. The names of drugs and the recurring players in the steroid game seemed a bit hard to follow at times, but painted a decent history of how the drugs have come to be a national problem. If you've read "Game of Shadows" about the Balco case, some of the information in the last third of the book will seem a bit old.

But if you're looking for more information about a contemporary problem in sports, this book might be worth a look.