The Untold and Insanely Weird Story of A-Rod’s Doping Habits

And why MLB quietly banned EPO, cycling’s drug of choice

By Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts
Illustration by Trenton Duerksen

Eccentric, exacting, and self-destructive—Alex Rodriguez is baseball’s Howard Hughes. He didn’t just shoot steroids or rub on cream like his predecessors, he took his banned substances intravenously while breathing from an oxygen tank, or while laying in a hyperbaric chamber in his Manhattan basement with little dogs yapping around him. He exchanged drugs for money in a bathroom of a Miami Starbucks, and allowed a twitchy, uneducated biochemist named Anthony Bosch to draw his blood in the men’s room of a chic nightclub. (Bosch, who Rodriguez kept on a six-figure annual retainer, promptly lost the vial of blood on the club’s dance floor.)

We reported a lot of his bizarre behavior in our new book Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era. But there are a whole bunch of details — including allegations concerning the true extent of Rodriguez’s relationship with a pseudo-scientist named Victor Conte—that came too late to meet the book’s deadline. This new information was provided by Bosch himself, who became Major League Baseball’s chief witness against his former…