Frank Mir: USADA Has Gone Overboard With Testing
Former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir is not a big fan of USADA. He violated the Anti-Doping Policy stemming from an in-competition sample collected the day of his fight against Mark Hunt at UFC Fight Night 85 on March 20, 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. After the news broke, Mir asked for his release from the UFC.
During a recent appearance on the Five Rounds podcast with Brett Okamoto, Mir gave his thoughts on USADA’s success and how it is affecting the UFC.
“I think it’s actually nailing a lot of guys it seems that aren’t trying to do anything wrong, to begin with. [There are] a lot of good examples of people – what about Tim Means? There’s a situation where somebody kind of got screwed that really wasn’t doing anything wrong or trying to really circumvent the system.
“I think now you have USADA is in the business of trying to catch as many people as they can and they’re trying to make the tests as sensitive as possible even before the tests are really plausible as far as, ‘well have you ruled out any other situations that could cause a false positive?’ And they come forward with the tests before that’s conclusive because they want to justify their paycheck at the end of the day.”
Mir believes that there are not a lot of people trying to cheat so USADA is trying to bust anyone for the smallest thing possible. Mir brought up Yoel Romero and Tim Means using supplements and getting popped by USADA.
“I think they’re in a situation where not that many people are really trying to cheat so now they’re trying to make the tests so extensive that they can find the minutest molecule someone might come in contact with but in a lot of situations, to really tell someone that they’re responsible for everything that enters into their body – we’ve already seen situations like Yoel Romero and Tim Means are buying supplements from the store and they’re getting in trouble. Then overseas guys eating tainted meats and now all of a sudden they test positive for clenbuterol. It’s overboard I think.”
Mir explained that the UFC is losing top-tier talent who aren’t doing anything wrong. Perfect examples are Lyoto Machida and BJ Penn according to the former heavyweight champ.
“I think right now we’re losing a lot of fighters. We lost Machida because he forgot to put something on his paperwork, B.J. Penn didn’t understand the new testing and took an IV months before the fight, not even a weight cutting situation. So I think we’re losing a lot of main event fighters to situations that are not actually cheating. I think you see that in a lot of movements. First you have something that’s not enough and then sometimes the response is overboard.
“I think right now we’re in the overboard status of our drug testing policy. I think that eventually, hopefully, it will come back to the middle where the tests are really trying to nail people that are trying to cheat or circumvent the system and not just somebody that happened to drink a protein shake at the local gym that wasn’t cleaned out well enough and the last guy put creatine in there or something and now it blows up his test.”
