The honeymoon is over.
When the UFC revealed the particulars of its new in-house drug-testing program at a press conference in June, the fight company enjoyed nearly unanimous approval.
It was an impressive show of force—a lineup of UFC executives flanked on stage by their new partners at the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Jeff Novitzky, the former government agent hired to be the fight company's drug czar, was there. USADA CEO Travis Tygart (pictured above) was there. Even American Olympic track and field legend Edwin Moses was there.
Together they laid out a hard-nosed array of policy reforms they said would turn up the heat on drug cheats.
“Our goal is to have the best anti-doping program in all of professional sport,” Novitzky said.
"This is a brand new and bright day for UFC athletes," Tygart said.
We ate it up. This was the thing we’d all been waiting for—America’s largest MMA company was finally partnering with a legitimate third-party agency on an aggressive, year-round drug-testing program.
This was cause for celebration.
This was the Holy Grail.
Now we have to wonder how much of it was just theater.
Our high hopes for the UFC-USADA partnership turned mostly to worry last week, after boxing writer Thomas Hauser made a laundry list of claims against the private, not-for-profit drug-testing company in a lengthy story published by SB Nation.
Hauser’s allegations—some buttressed by reporting, some not—were rooted in boxing, where USADA at one time or another has handled drug-testing duties for Floyd Mayweather, Golden Boy Promotions and promoter Al Haymon, among others.
The crux of his story’s most specific claims center on USADA’s handling of boxer Erik Morales’ failed drug tests around a 2012 fight, as well as its decision to retroactively grant Mayweather a therapeutic use exemption for intravenous rehydration after weighing in for his May superfight against Manny Pacquiao.
Hauser also rails against the company’s fee structure, its alleged lack of transparency and what he sees as an effort to mislead both state athletic commissions and keep Pacquiao’s team in the dark regarding Mayweather’s IV use until well after their fight.
While Hauser never mentions the UFC or MMA at all, his broader conclusion is the one that should trouble folks on our side of the street. Basically, he alleges USADA may provide special accommodations for “clients who either pay more for its services or use USADA on a regular basis.”
That’s exactly the kind of client the UFC appears to be for USADA, and the notion of preferential treatment is the very thing we have been afraid of all along.
It’s necessary to point out that we don’t know how many of Hauser’s accusations hold water. His SB Nation piece is impressive in its scope, but it straddles a strange line between news expose, feature story and opinion column.
For people who have been around combat sports a long time, much of what he writes has the ring of truth. However, there are still some leaps into rumor and personal judgment, which ultimately cloud the end results.
Even if all Hauser’s accusations could be proved accurate, we still don’t know how much—if at all—any of this boxing stuff relates to the agency’s relationship with the UFC.
What we do know is that it doesn’t paint a very reassuring picture.
USADA’s response to Hauser’s story was strongly worded but narrowly focused. Without referring to the report by name it charges “recent on-line articles” with “numerous unfounded and false accusations.”
You can read the entire statement here. The general gist is summed up with this quote:
As such, it is unfortunate and extremely disappointing to have to address articles riddled with significant inaccuracies and misrepresentations based on unsubstantiated rumors as well as anonymous or self-interested sources that have recklessly called our integrity into question. It is simply absurd to suggest that we would ever compromise our integrity for any sport or athlete.
The rest of the USADA response dealt almost exclusively with the Mayweather IV incident. Hauser’s additional “multitude of errors” will be addressed “at the appropriate time” it said, though it didn’t give any indication when that might be.
As MMA Junkie.com’s Ben Fowlkes noted this week, the statement itself doesn’t refute the troubling idea that USADA granted Mayweather a retroactive TUE.
“So as [Mayweather] was sitting there with the plastic tube in his arm on May 1, he would seem to have been in violation ...” Fowlkes wrote. “It was only the TUE he got after the fact—on May 20, according to Hauser’s story, 18 days after the fight—that made it retroactively legal.”
Therein lies the rub.
Did USADA give Mayweather special treatment to make sure his big-money fight with Pacquaio went off as scheduled? And would it do the same for the UFC if a high-profile bout were at stake?
The chief concerns with the UFC conducting its own drug testing have always been about transparency and even-handed treatment for its athletes. The reason many observers (including this one) long urged the fight company to partner with an independent third party was to clear up the conflict of interest inherent in its self-regulation.
The UFC appeared to botch Cung Le’s failed test for elevated levels of testosterone during the fall of 2014 and eventually had to rescind his one-year suspension.
Throughout Vitor Belfort’s dalliance with testosterone replacement therapy—during which the fighter went 3-0 in 2013—UFC President Dana White assured us again and again that Belfort was subjected to rigorous UFC-sponsored testing. Yet when the Nevada State Athletic Commission served Belfort with a surprise drug test in February 2014, he failed it.
After those incidents and others, the UFC’s need to seek outside help was clear. We applauded the fight company for choosing USADA a bit more than three months ago. At the same time, we worried the UFC might partner with a group that would be malleable to its own wishes.
Now, the Hauser report makes that exact case about USADA and the other high-profile entities it serves.
"UFC has zero input or influence over the program," Tygart assured us during the introductory press conference.
We hope that’s true. We want to believe that’s the case. At this point, however, we have doubts.
It didn’t help at all that in the immediate wake of Hauser’s story, reports also emerged that USADA had given UFC heavyweight Frank Mir a therapeutic use exemption for Adderall leading up to his UFC 191 bout against Andrei Arlovski. Allegedly, it did this without asking the NSAC first.
Novitsky told MMA Fighting.com’s Marc Raimondi that when Mir learned there wasn’t enough time for him to petition the NSAC for a state-sponsored TUE, he stopped taking the amphetamine. Adderall is often used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD, but it is also banned by many sports organizations because it can be a performance enhancer.
NSAC chairman Bob Bennett didn’t seem to take kindly to the notion that USADA can approve TUEs for UFC fighters.
"It's really non-negotiable," Bennett told Raimondi. "The Nevada State Athletic Commission is the only body that can authorize a therapeutic use exemption in the state of Nevada."
Bennett expanded on those thoughts to Lance Pugmire of the LA Times:
"They're confusing the fighters," Nevada commission executive director Bob Bennett said of USADA.
— Lance Pugmire (@latimespugmire) September 10, 2015
Even still, Novitsky told Raimondi his confidence in USADA remains high:
Based on 15 years of working with them and seeing how they make decisions and seeing how those decisions are ethical and how every single time they adhere to carrying out the WADA code, I have 100 percent confidence that we have enlisted the gold standard, best anti-doping agency in the world and all of our athletes should have that same trust and confidence. I haven't lost any of that in USADA. They're the best.
That confidence may still ring through the halls of Zuffa, LLC headquarters, but in the wake of the Hauser report and the Mir stories, you couldn’t blame outside observers for being slightly less sure.
UFC fans need to know the company’s USADA-led program really is the formidable weapon against doping we were led to believe it was back in June. We need to be certain it’s an actual path to a cleaner sport and not just a smokescreen.
Luckily for everyone involved, there will be an easy way to know for sure: The program will either get results, or it won’t.
Simply put, USADA has to catch high-profile performance-enhancing drug abusers in the UFC. It has to serve them with adequate suspensions. Heck, it probably wouldn’t hurt if the agency had to step in and tear down some highly anticipated UFC fights once or twice.
That sounds like awfully tough love, but how else to prove the organization isn’t just carrying the UFC’s water?
In his SB Nation story, Hauser quotes USADA senior communications manager Annie Skinner saying that of the 46 professional boxing bouts for which the agency has conducted drug testing, “At this time, the only professional boxer under USADA’s program who has been found to have committed an anti-doping rule violation is Erik Morales.”
And Morales, remember, was allowed to fight anyway.
Something tells me if USADA puts up similar numbers during its UFC tenure, consumer confidence will not return. If better results are forthcoming, however, perhaps then we will all feel better about what is really going on here.
What we can’t have is many more stories like Mir’s Adderall use. We can’t have any of this nonsense about retroactive TUEs. We can’t have situations like the one involving Morales, where Hauser alleges everyone involved knew he’d failed multiple PED tests.
MMA fans heard a lot of promises during that press conference back in June. We were told USADA was here to clean up our sport. We were told it would be a difficult, demanding job but in the end it would be worth it, because we would have full confidence in the UFC’s athletic integrity.
Hauser’s report and the Mir story don’t disprove any of that, but they put the new drug-testing program under a microscope.
We’ll be watching whatever happens next very closely.
Chances are, we’ll know in short order where the truth lies.
Then we’ll know if our hopes for a cleaner sport were all in vain.
