Tom Farrey is a veteran journalist whose work has been recognized among the nation’s best on television, in print and online.  A regular correspondent with ESPN’s primetime newsmagazine E:60, he has been called a “brilliant investigative reporter” by the Boston Globe and in 2007 was one of seven journalists selected among the “100 Most Influential Sports Educators in America” by a panel of experts brought together by the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island.

Farrey has also contributed reporting for Outside the Lines and SportsCenter, ESPN.com, and in ESPN the Magazine, where he is a Senior Writer. His work has won two Emmy awards for Outstanding Sports Journalism as well as top national honors from, among other organizations, the Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation.

He joined ESPN in 1996 after eight years with The Seattle Times. His career has been devoted to telling the stories that connect the world of sports to the most relevant themes in the broader society—whether it be race, gender, politics, economics, technology, science, immigration, ethics, education or otherwise. His approach is to treat sports as a significant cultural force worthy of first-rate reporting.

With E:60, Farrey broke the story of parents buying the sperm of anonymous college athletes, a development that offers a window into society’s growing appreciation for athletic children. He has reported on the Super Bowl of prison football at an infamous Louisiana penitentiary, the cloning of champion race horses, and the true public costs of the New York Yankees’ new $1.9 billion stadium project that’s built on top of a children’s playground. He has also authored defining profiles of such compelling athletes as age-defying swimmer Dara Torres, mixed martial arts fighter Brock Lesnar, and NASCAR prodigy Joey Logano. In 2007, Farrey told one of the more touching stories of the year, the return of a Lost Boy marathoner to the war-torn village in Sudan he left as a boy.

His stories have been a catalyst for change.

In 2004, Farrey presented a three-part Outside the Lines series on the corrupt business of recruiting and signing Dominican baseball prospects.  The series discovered that the names and ages of teenagers were easily changed by unscrupulous street agents, and revealed how one major league team (the Arizona Diamondbacks) made a $100,000 side payment to a street agent to steer a future major league pitcher their way. He also found prospects who had died after injecting their bodies with animal compounds in an attempt to bulk up for tryouts with major league scouts. A subsequent survey of Dominican players at team academies—the first-ever drug tests conducted by MLB—found that a whopping 11 percent of signed players were on steroids. Farrey’s series won a Television Investigative Reporting award from Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists.

In April 2008, former American League MVP Miguel Tejada was forced to change his age in official baseball records as a result of an E:60 report that he has lied about his birth date and identity throughout his major league career. The revelation came at a time when Tejada, who is two years older than he had said he was (and whose real name is Tejeda), was under federal investigation for possibly lying to Congressional investigators about his use of steroids. It also meant the Houston Astros had acquired a shortstop over the winter who was 33, not 31, in picking up the final two years of a six-year, $72 million contract that had been gained with false information. A top executive for the Baltimore Orioles, his previous team, said the club wouldn’t have given him as long a contract if it knew the player’s true age.

In 2001, Farrey’s ground-breaking report on the torture of Iraqi soccer players and other athletes by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, the nation’s top Olympic official, led to the disbanding of the Iraqi Olympic governing body by the International Olympic Committee. That year, Farrey also exposed Christopher Robin Academy, an obscure New York high school that dispensed bogus grades to top basketball prospects so they could qualify for NCAA ball, for Outside the Lines. His reporting revealed a loophole in the eligibility process for revenue-producing athletes, and the NCAA later moved to create a list of dubious schools. Both stories won Emmy awards for journalism.

Farrey has reported stories from Europe, Africa and Australia, as well as several countries in Latin America.  His hour-long ESPN documentary, “Witness to a Defection,” on Cuban baseball defectors included a hometown interview with future major league star Jose Contreras before he fled the country.  In 1999, he was among the first to report on the flow of steroids from Mexico, with a hidden-camera investigation in which he bought steroids and showed the level of illegal activity in Tijuana’s pharmacies. In 2007, an E:60 investigation documented the illegal trafficking of a 14-year-old soccer star from Senegal to Portugal.

For a provocative look into the world of genetic testing and talent identification, Farrey went to Australia with a cheek swab to get his one-year-old son screened for athletic traits. The story, which appeared in ESPN Magazine, served as the inspiration for a book, his first, which Farrey would write on the state of modern youth sports. The acclaimed book, Game on: the All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children, was published in May 2008. In 2004 and 2006, he served as Master of Ceremonies for the National Youth Sports Awards, as presented by the Positive Coaching Alliance.

At the Seattle Times, Farrey covered the NBA and NFL, and events including the Olympics and World Cup. In 1992, he broke the news of improper loans given to the quarterback of the University of Washington football team, which led to NCAA sanctions that included a bowl ban for the defending national champions. One of his Sunday magazine pieces, on prison basketball, was selected for the annual anthology, “Best American Sports Writing.”

His reports also have appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight and Good Morning America, and in Business Week, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald.

A native of Hollywood, Fla., and graduate of the University of Florida, Farrey now lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and their three children, Cole, Anna and Kellen.