« A very odd feeling going into the UFC 115 fight with Chuck Liddell and Rich Franklin | Home | Talk Radio: Can Scott Coker create more of a sense of urgency with Strikeforce? »
The Nevada State Athletic Commission’s posturing on steroids and drug testing
By Zach Arnold | June 9, 2010
If you haven’t read Ivan Trembow’s summary yet on what today’s telephone conference call was like, this is a must-read summary. (E-mail me if you managed to catch the call today.)
As most of you know, Dr. Margaret Goodman talked about this conference call (before it happened) and thought that maybe, finally, the NSAC would at least acknowledge that there is a problem and that all the silly talk from Keith Kizer about the urine-testing they do being adequate would stop. Unfortunately, before and after the meeting, it’s not stopping. It’s only becoming more of an entrenched public stance by the NSAC.
I know that this is one of those “death by a 1,000 paper cuts” situation for the NSAC, but it’s a very hard position to take publicly to say that you have can’t spend a few hundred dollars on drug testing fighters who make hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, per fight.
At the end of the day, I thought the NSAC would at least publicly state that they would keep an open-mind to improving drug testing procedures and go forward in the future, much like Dr. Goodman said when she noted that the NSAC’s position probably would be fluid. In one sense, they did by allowing Mr. Tygart to state his case. But, for the most part, the NSAC went into backing their current position for this “informational” meeting.
Eddie Goldman has posted the audio online of the conference call (here and here). Lots to listen to.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 5 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
So that means you’d only test the main eventers with new testing. And so what, they’ll quickly find ways around that too. As soon as a new policy comes in, people go to work figuring out how to beat it. Then next year you’ll see guys obviously using bragging about how they passed the tough new tests so can’t possibly be drug users and the outrage for a new testing system will come back and the cycle of life continues. That would give us, what, 5 years before the next testing idea passes the commission?
The only thing to keep them honest would be random testings for everybody and do it more than once a fight (because they’ll obviously go “I got tested, now I can go back to PEDs before the cutoff point so I can test clean before the fight.”) But you can’t do everybody and certainly not numerous times a fight cycle because you can’t expect the non-UFC guys who make $2,000 guaranteed a fight to pay $500 to get Olympic tested. That would cripple them financially when they have to still pay their trainers and manager 20-30% in addition to taxes so they’ll be left where fighting isn’t worth it. And the promotions certainly won’t pay for it.
And even saying they have an open mind to new testing wasn’t going to happen. That would mean admitting lots of guys are getting over on them, when they know they cannot put a new system in place, so that’s admitting “the fighters you’re seeing are doping” which would hurt the sport. A mirage of strict testing is better (for PR) than admitting it’s all worthless. All they need is the occasional dummy to take horse steroids so they can say “See! We catch people!”
Combine that with the two top fighting states Nevada and California in financial apocalypse and it’s not going to happen.
[…] on the site I alluded to the conference call that the Nevada State Athletic Commission had yesterday regarding their drug testing policies. Leland Roling asks a very good question — are MMA […]
[…] If you haven’t already listened to the audio of the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s conference call from Wednesday on the issue of improving drug testing, click here for the audio links and report summary. […]
[…] course, led to a public hearing on how Nevada could improve its drug testing only to have doctors (more details here and here from the LVRJ) come on and say the current testing process is fine. His comments here and […]
[…] of the conversation, but I’ve listened to the audio from that conference hearing. (Audio and notes here.) On top of that, it was Mr. Kizer who touted that the state would do out-of-competition drug […]