Dimensions
137 x 211 x 21mm
'Blood Sports' is a gripping, insightful and provocative insider's look at the issue of drugs in sport – the deaths, the scandals, the conspiracies, and the on-going race to beat the cheats.
Coincidence or cover-up? Between 1987 and 1990, more than twenty professional cyclists died. Some in the sleep, some on their bikes. All from heart failure. Why? The answer was EPO - a dangerous new blood substitute designed to
increase oxygen - but you wouldn't have known it at the time. While steroids were prominent in the public conscience, EPO was the drug nobody talked about, and for which no sports authority wanted a test. No test meant no fear, and at the Tour de France, at the Olympics, at sports events around the globe, a silent killer led countless athletes to victory. And many others to their death.
It wasn't until 1999 that sports authorities got serious about fighting EPO, and Robin Parisotto was their weapon of choice. Implemented at the Sydney Olympics, and hailed as the biggest anti-doping breakthrough in over thirty years, Parisotto's EPO test was the culmination of extraordinary journey along the cutting edge of research, and at the highest levels of international sport.
'Blood Sports' is the story of that journey.
