Mark Fainaru-Wada

Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter credited with exposing the steroid scandal case known as BALCO. With his colleague Lance Williams, Fainaru-Wada wrote the book Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports, a New York Times bestseller. President Bush congratulated Fainaru-Wada and Williams for providing a public service to the country—a service that also caused them to be threatened with an 18-month jail sentence.

Since he began working on the BALCO steroid case for the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2003, Fainaru-Wada’s investigative work has earned him a string of national honors. They include the George Polk, Edgar A. Poe, and Dick Schaap Excellence in Journalism and Associated Press Sports Editors awards. Fainaru-Wada and Williams also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and The Today Show.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams’s book Game of Shadows prompted Major League Baseball to launch an investigation into steroid use in its sport. In May 2006, both reporters were issued subpoenas to testify before a grand jury investigating the source of some of the information they published in The Chronicle and their book. The reporters vowed not to reveal their sources and were appealing their sentence of up to 18 months in prison when the government dropped the subpoenas in February.

Fainaru-Wada’s notable projects have included an investigation into the expanding influence of sports agents, an inside look at how scam artists use athletes to lure investors into bogus business ventures, and revealing profiles of the controversial owners of the Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers.

Fainaru-Wada currently reports for ESPN. He previously worked for the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote enterprise stories and covered Stanford football and men's basketball. He was also a national sportswriter for Scripps Howard News Service, covering the Masters, Wimbledon and the Final Four. He has worked at the National all-sports daily, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.