Blood Sport - Tim Elfrink

The definitive and dramatic story of the Alex Rodriguez and Biogenesis scandal, written by the reporters who broke and covered the story

On January 29th, 2013, an expos by Miami New Times reporter Tim Elfrink set the sports world on fire. Elfrink revealed that a Miami clinic, Biogenesis, had been supplying illegal performance enhancing drugs – PEDs – to many of the nation’s top baseball stars. One name stood out among all the others: Alex Rodriguez, the highest-earning player in the game.

Over the next year and more the story would unravel with incredible details about tanning salon robberies, coded text messages, and furtive steroid injections in the men’s room. In late 2013 Alex Rodriguez would be hit with the longest suspension in MLB history, prompting an ugly fight between him and top league brass. Fourteen other players, including superstar Ryan Braun, were also given shorter suspensions. Tony Bosch, Biogenesis’s founder, would appear on 60 Minutes in an effort to tell his side of the story.

What’s already been reported in the press has been fascinating; but the story behind the headlines that Elfrink and Newsday reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts have unearthed is even more dramatic and full of new, shocking details. Using exclusive documents, never-before-reported records and interviews with top sources, this book takes the reader inside drug deals, athletes’ mansions, and confidential suspension hearings to tell the true story behind the sport’s continuing PED crisis.

Both news-breaking sports journalism and wild South Florida noir, Blood Sport is simultaneously a revelatory record of the steroid and PED era’s continuing evolution and a call to arms for how to end it – this time, for good.

Tim Elfrink , managing editor of the Miami New Times , was the very first reporter to break the story of the Biogenesis scandal. His original story won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. He lives in Miami.

Gus Garcia-Roberts is an award-winning investigative reporter for Newsday , Long Island's daily newspaper.He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2014 for the paper's series on police misconduct. He previously was a staff writer at Cleveland Scene and the senior writer at Miami New Times.He lives in Brooklyn.

Praise for Blood Sport

"Have you read Blood Sport, the jaw-dropping new A-Rod/Biogenesis/steroids book from Newsday investigative reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts and Miami digger Tim Elfrink? If you care about baseball's clean future, you really have no choice."—Ellis Henican, Newsday

“A rollicking new book that reads like tragicomic noir fiction.” - Huffington Post Live

“Blood Sport” is riveting…The story of Rodriguez’s alliance with Bosch — and their eventual falling-out, with disastrous consequences for both — is a tragicomedy filled with characters straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel: fake doctors, ex-cons, small-time grifters and a shady tanning-bed repairman whose theft of some Biogenesis documents set in motion much of the legal drama that ensued.”— The Washington Post

“Tim Elfrink’s stories have brought down Alex Rodriguez, shut down the clinic that provided A-Rod performance-enhancing drugs, led to the record-breaking suspension of more than a dozen major leaguers and helped to usher in a new, seemingly cleaner era for baseball.”— The Omaha World-Herald

““Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era” is full of juicy bits.” –CBS New York

“Once again, baseball proves to be more scandalous than a telenovela!”—Perez Hilton

“Earnest, well researched, well written…go for the book.”— The Epoch Times

"My Book of the Year so far...[the book] arrived at the most timely moment when the matter of drugs, whether recreational or performance enhancing, is a raging debate in all sports." - David Mackintosh