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Cheat!

Reporting On A Doping Scandal

Cheat!

Sony Music

True Crime, Tv & Film, Society & Culture

4.81.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2003 news spread of a government backed raid on a small laboratory near the San Francisco airport. The lab was called BALCO. As two journalists at the local paper started to dig deeper they began to realise this raid would uncover secrets that would change the face of sport forever. What they didn’t realise however was how this story would test their own resolve and put their freedom at risk. A Somethin' Else production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Some for us.

0:07.0

Journalists, lands, Williams and his partner Mark are going through boxes and boxes of documents.

0:13.0

We were in an office when it was at night.

0:18.0

They're in a rush.

0:19.0

These documents are actually transcripts of testimonies given in secret,

0:24.0

and they don't know how much time they have.

0:27.0

We could only be in there a certain amount of time, and so we just divvy them up.

0:34.0

Lands took one box, Mark took another.

0:38.0

We did it really old school, we took notes.

0:42.0

They didn't have time to make copies or risk taking sketchy photos because the year was 2004,

0:49.0

and we all know the camera phones back then were as good as useless.

0:54.0

Handwritten notes were the only thing they could truly trust,

0:58.0

and that's because these testimonies were the key to a story both Mark and Lance have been trying to get to the bottom of for a year.

1:05.0

A lab in San Francisco called Balco that was under investigation for supplying dozens of athletes with illegal performance enhancing drugs,

1:13.0

including home run hero Barry Barnes and Sprinter Marion Jones.

1:19.0

So here Lance and Mark were in some non-descript office block in the dead of night,

1:25.0

reading the testimonies of the biggest sports stars on the planet.

1:29.0

Bonds and Marion Jones were the athletes who refused to acknowledge what they've been doing,

1:37.0

and so those transcripts were interesting watching them spar with the prosecutors and so forth.

1:44.0

Many of the other athletes gave it up, just gave it all up.

1:49.0

We are going through all this material, and you know, and I think Lance and I at various points,

1:55.0

you know, are looking at each other laughing, I think, because we can't believe not only are good fortune,

...

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