Big Think

Question: Why did you write Steroid Nation?

Shaun Assael: I had been on the steroid be free ESPN for five years. I was one of the first people to kind of understand the cat and mouse game between the drug testers and the cheaters, and in the course of that, had come to have a strange email relationship with Victor Kanti [phonetic] shortly after the FEDs raided Balco [phonetic], which was of course that informer’s supplement steroid lab in California.

And as I covered the story, is he started see Athletes being hob before the grand jury to testify, you started to see really the emergence of an Anti-doping bureaucracy a police force that was patrolling the sports landscape. I was kind of I understood that was seeing the creation of some thing, and I wanted to take a step back and explain to people who didn’t understand the certain emergence of these headlines here, how we got to where we are. And so the book became a big lens look at, how we got to the place we are.

Question: What was your process?

Sean Assael: It was a hard book to conceive because while I knew I wanted to start at the Jim’s inventive speech in the early ‘80’s and I understood that was kind of the muscle culture and that I wanted to see evolve, you still need a main character, a book that already been written about Barry Bonds and other one had been written by Jose Conseco, instead, what are who I found and he ultimately became if not the main character a significant threat to the book was Dandu Shain, who was the Timothy Larry of the Steroid nation, the guy who first in Gold’s Gym convinced every body to drop in and tune up.

Question: What surprised you the most?

Shaun Assael: You know that they meet at the cross roads of optimism and Everest optimism, because the people who take them are just trying to be better versions of them selves, they have in their mind the American dream and all they trying to do is kind of reach that brass ring. Everest because invariably they like a smoldering fire, hard to control and in the course of trying to be better invariably and it happens time and time again with people in my book, they lose sight of where they end when the drugs begin and that’s where you get in to this another world and that is what Everest takes over when having lost sight of the missiles, it is not just about being the best I could be but being even better and better and better than that and that becomes a grey area and off times it doesn’t end well.

Recorded on: March 18, 2008.