Athletics: Balco Whistleblowers Face Jail

The two American journalists whose brilliant investigative work on the drugs scandal involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco) did so much to uncover the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport in the United States today face the prospect of being sent to jail for up to 18 months.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are due to attend a hearing in San Francisco where a judge will give them one final chance to reveal the names of their sources. The San Francisco Chronicle writers have already made it clear that they are not prepared to do that, so prison seems inevitable.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams used confidential sources, including leaked grand jury testimony, to expose how some of the biggest names in sport were part of a conspiracy to distribute anabolic steroids and other drugs led by the Balco founder and owner, Victor Conte. But federal prosecutors are asking for the maximum 18-months sentence for the two after their refusal to say where they obtained all the information.

Among those unmasked by their reporting was Barry Bonds, America's biggest baseball star, triggering a chain reaction that saw several other leading names from the sport implicated, prompting pressure from Congress that forced the players' union to submit to a call for stricter testing and harsher penalties. Yet Congress is now unwilling to intervene to keep out of prison the men who gave them that ammunition.