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Alistair Overeem draws the heat for PEDs, but a lot of fighters are watching their backs
By Zach Arnold | May 17, 2010
There’s two passages from Sunday night’s Observer radio show that I wanted to highlight for you. The first passage deals with the current urine drug testing system used by the state athletic commissions. Dave Meltzer argues that even if you adopted Olympic-style drug testing like Eddie Goldman has proposed that you would still be behind the curve in terms of catching cheaters. If drug testing is looked at as an IQ test, how much more effective would a blood-based drug testing system be? That’s the debate presented here.
DAVE MELTZER: “I’ll tell you what, like, I talked to some fighters the last couple of days on the drug testing thing and it’s… you know, everyone knows the kind of drug testing you have now… it is what it is but it’s, you know, I mean, it keeps people from being on steroids the last two weeks before a fight. Does it people keep off steroids completely? No, not at all. And it catches dumb people who use you know deca-durabolin which you know can show up nine months later and then they get all mad when they get caught with it because they’ve probably been off it for a long enough time but their body like you know everyone’s body is different when it comes to that drug and you know they probably read in their little textbook that you know as long as I get off it by this date I’m fine but when it comes to that one, you know, deca and sometimes you know Stanozolol (Winstrol), which is the one that guys always get caught for, not everybody is the same as far as like clearance time and sometimes you’ll even be clean like a week before the fight and let’s say like you stopped deca, let’s say you stopped deca six months before the fight and you test yourself a month before the fight and you’re clean, that doesn’t mean that the day of the fight you’re going to show up and be clean again. Which is where a lot of guys get nailed and that’s those guys that you know you hear about the guys, ‘I tested myself the week before, I tested myself the week after, therefore this test must be screwed up,’ no, what it is it is your body screwed you.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Talk about just telling the world you’re on something, by the way. Why the [expletive] would you test yourself the week before if you’ve never been taking anything?”
DAVE MELTZER: “Yeah, why would you? I don’t know.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “I got a fight coming up and just to make sure that I’m not on steroids, I’m going to test myself.”
DAVE MELTZER: “Yeah, under my wife’s name.”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “Yeah, you never know when that bottle of creatine from GNC might you know just have something in it.”
The second passage deals with the heat that Alistair Overeem has been taking from the media for allegations of PEDs/steroids. The quote from Overeem about the Strikeforce-administered drug test comes from these comments.
Josh Gross sounds this ominous warning:
Missouri’s Strikeforce drug test results 1-2 days away, but they will not be released to media, says MOA Administrator Tim Lueckenhoff.
The second passage here deals with the issue that I was railing about last week, which is the complete and total hypocrisy of steroids coverage not just by the MMA media but by the sports media in general in terms of addressing the truths at hand.
DAVE MELTZER: “Yeah, but the thing is, usage of performance-enhancing drugs in MMA is very, very prevalent and you know even if they do Olympic-style drug testing, they’re still not going to catch the growth hormone no matter what the people tell you about there’s a new test. Ain’t going to happen and they’re not doing blood tests of fighters anyways. I think that maybe like at the top level when you got your championship fights, they probably should do more extensive testing but I don’t know that it’s going to happen so we’ve got this system. But you know I mean it was just funny because again like [Saturday] night with Overeem and everything, you know and he’s out there going like, ‘When I passed my test, everyone’s going to know, that’s the proof right there when I pass my test’ and it’s like, that’s not proof of anything, anything at all. You know I’m sure he will probably will pass his test. What will that mean?”
BRYAN ALVAREZ: “It means he passed his test and that’s about it.”
DAVE MELTZER: “The other thing is that again by mentioning Overeem or Brock Lesnar’s name always pop up because he’s so big and people go, ‘well he’s on steroids.’ You know the odds are that you know that there’s tons of guys who don’t even have good physiques like Josh Barnett that are just likely to be on this stuff as Alistair Overeem, you know, I mean, they’re taking it for you know I mean you know a lot of them don’t, you know a lot of the fighters do not train like bodybuilders or have the genetics of bodybuilders so even on steroids they’re not going to out there and look like Alistair Overeem. Very few of those guys could take, they could kill themselves on steroids and there’s the percentage of these guys that could look like Alistair Overeem is under 5%.”
While I am glad that there are media writers coming around to the fact that MMA has a serious drug problem, what I am perplexed by is the lack of enthusiasm for a blood-based drug testing system that would catch a significantly higher portion of the cheaters. I believe that an Olympic-style drug testing system would be beneficial for the safety of the fighters in and out of competition. Plus, if the idea is to promote MMA as a sport, then doing whatever is possible to make the field as level as you can (to an extent) is a step in the right direction.
Topics: Media, MMA, StrikeForce, UFC, Zach Arnold | 17 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
On one hand, it’s not like there’s the business incentive for MMA to tolerate PEDs like there was for baseball in the late ’90s when the home runs got so much press. Fighters are popular based on personality and aggression rather than how cut they look, and performance relative to each other doesn’t sell tickets for the promoter. On the other hand, MMA fans (and to a lesser extent the press) don’t get worked up since there’s no stat records to break.
One issue is that if you test, build a fighter, and the guy leaves and gets crushed in a place that doesn’t test, that would make your promotion look weaker. It really needs to be industry-wide.
At least one business incentive is that fighters who are on performance enhancers tend to recover from injuries faster, making it less likely main event fighters will drop out.
Michael is correct.
Also fighters can continue to be competitve longer into their careers. That’s very important from a business standpoint. It takes awhile to make a fighter popular. You want to keep a draw going as long as you can.
Why should they do blood tests? The tests that are out there are not 100% valid. They are not substance specific tests. Go watch Bigger, Faster, Stronger…. I’m not so sure more testing is really the answer. The CORRECT kind of testing the answer. And that isn’t exactly available at a cheap price these days.
Simple enough to answer: The fans of MMA don’t care if these guys are gassed up. They probably prefer it so long as they can do bigger slams and punch harder.
Exactly.
Same with all sports.
I don’t know why journalists focus on PEDs so much. Most fans simply don’t care.
It also rings hollow and sounds hypocritical to me. If you really cared about the health of the athletes you’d ban MMA, boxing and football outright.
Let’s get one thing clear here, let’s not be hypocrites: we can’t rail against lack of testing and then when guys are tested say that it means nothing. This bs is what turned me off to the hypocrits that covered baseball that used to go on and on about hitters taking PED’s but always let pitchers off the hook even though more pitchers have tested positive than hitters have.
Not to mention that we have to first make sure that these test are on the up and up because Sherk got screwed over by the idiots who run the CSAC. So first let’s clean up the process than we can worry about testing because a test means nothing if the people doing it are morons.
The pitcher versus hitter deal is more because pitchers usually aren’t on the verge of breaking a record as sacred as home run records are. Bonds, Sosa and McGwire got the most heat of anybody because they broke records and Alex Rodriguez got heat because he’s the highest paid player in the game so he has a target on his back no matter what he does or doesn’t do. Even superstar pitchers don’t get nearly the same press coverage.
What fighter(s) has admitted that he self-tested himself a week before a fight?
Are there fighters who only use HGH? Is HGH a strong enough cheating method that you don’t have to take steroids with it?
If it’s well known that fighters who cheat do not use two weeks before a fight, why are the commissions not testing them before that two week period?
Money.
Testing guys costs money. Testing them multiple times costs even more money. Ditto for blood testing. Blood tests are way more expensive than urine tests, and still don’t solve the problem of guys cycling. The notion that blood tests are a panacea is false.
The only real solution is year round testing, and even that won’t catch the guys using designer drugs.
I thought there were reports that a lot of camps are pre-testing their fighters. I’m almost 99.9% sure people have talked about Sherk doing this before fights since he’d been caught…and I recall hearing rumors/off-hand comments that the Minnesota MMA team does pre-fight testing. Whether that’s true or not is another thing, so don’t pitchfork me for saying it, as I said it was rumor only.
Dave Meltzer should pay you to refrain from transcribing his audio.
Who are Dave and Bryan referencing to when they talk about a fighter testing with their wife’s name?
Zach,
Personally, I think that legal, supervised use of anabolics/metabolics could improve fighter health & safety more than full-on comprehensive testing and that the additional monies saved could go towards optimizing post-concussion/post-fight recovery.
I’m also concerned about the false positives and lack of understanding/interpretation of the test results (Sherk & Landis).
As for pre-testing, if I knew that someone was out to get me (like Armando Garcia), I would definitely do it if I thought their test was suspect.
What Meltzer said could be true as well, if the steroids are stored in the fat and the fighter cuts weight (sauna) before a fight, the steroids could be released from the fat so the test results might be negative (-1 wk) positive (0 wk) negative (+1 wk).
Mattio, to see what resistance to GH looks like google “Laron type” dwarfism.
Meltzer is also wrong and right about the new GH test.
Wrong: for up to 36hrs the GH doping could be detected. The test is for a change in the ratio of large:small GH.
He is right in regards that if they dope with both the large&small forms of GH the test could be compromised. Currently, only the large form of GH is readily available.
Eventually, somebody will propose that fMRI be used to determine if the fighter or his camp is being deceptive about the use of PEDs.
Zach, it seems like the costs of blood testing are prohibitive. Is that a reasonable argument in favor of urine testing? What are some suggestions about who will foot the bill of blood testing, and how?
[…] discussion pertaining to Performance Enhancing Drugs in MMA is really picking […]
The truth is people do not care about steroids. We all have suspicions of practically everybody using something, but I don’t think many people, with the exception of the Barnett situation because he handled it so poorly, stopped supporting a fighter who tested positive. It’s a press issue. It’s easy to write or talk about, you can rehash the same talking points endlessly, the scandal guarantees page hits. But at the end of the day nearly every comment on it from regular fans is apathetic. Probably more due to the fact that everybody is used to athletes doping. But the Nick Diaz marijuana issue got a far more lively discussion than any steroid discussion I’ve ever seen on MMA websites.