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Monday notes: Drug testing at UFC 72
By Zach Arnold | May 14, 2007
Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio celebrated the ESPN/Sherdog tie-up on his show today. Audio clip here (start around the 8 minute mark).
Results from our last site poll question: Do you care about ethical business dealings in MMA?
Yes – 77%
No – 23%
New poll question added to the right side of the page.
K-1 6/28 Tokyo, Nippon Budokan World MAX card line-up:
- Masato vs. J.Z. Calvan
- Buakaw Por Pramuk vs. Nicky Holtzken
- Andy Souwer vs. Ian Schaffa
- Drago vs. Mike Zambidis
- Yoshihiro Sato vs. Dennis Schneidmiller
- Albert Kraus vs. Virgil Kalakoda
- Artur Kyshenko vs. Soo Hwan Lee
- Takayuki Kohiruimaki vs. Tsogto “Shinobu” Amara
- TATSUJI vs. Andy Ologun
Onto today’s headlines.
- The Houston Chronicle: Fans to foot the bill for UFC 72
- The Arizona Republic: Boxer Tommy Morrison vs. John Stover in MMA on June 9th
- AOL Sports Blog: Hagler vs. Hearns – Fans got money’s worth
- China Combat: Wohsai 7th MMA amateur competition videos
- The Press Enterprise: LA Dodgers’ Rudy Seanez an Ultimate Pitcher
- The Las Vegas Sun: Liddell -280, Rampage +240 with oddsmakers
- Mad Squabbles: PRIDE – Show or sport?
- MMA HQ: ESPN partners with Sherdog
- The Houston Chronicle: Drug testing will take place at UFC 72
- Komikazee: Art of War 2 show review
- Prime Newswire (PR): Pro Elite now a fully reporting public company (stock quote here)
- Gambling 911: Calvin Ayre hesitated on showing Windy Tomomi breakage
Topics: BoDog, Boxing, HERO's, Japan, K-1, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Pro Elite, UFC, Zach Arnold | 13 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Man, Dana is pure snake oil. Like you really need a commission to set up drug testing. All you need to do is to have someone adminster the tests and ensure chain of custody to the lab. Then the lab sends you the results. How hard is that exactly?
Perhaps it’s an issue of having the authority to make the fighters submit to a lab exam? It might be something they had to write into bout agreements when they were signed by the fighters.
Great. What MMA needs. Someone with HIV/AIDS.
Also there are serious issues regarding setting fines and suspensions for your own fighters. Go too easy and you’re stuck in just as big of a controversy. Go too hard and you’re accused of screwing over fighters. Honestly, it’s something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. There’s no doubt the UFC just said ‘Fuck it, who cares’ with the previous two shows. Now they know they can’t get away with that, so they’ll have to cook something up.
That K-1 MAX card is STACKED!!!!
Grape Knee High,
According to Dave Meltzer, the UFC was prepared to drug test in England, and at the last minute, the LAWYERS (not Dana White) were the ones who put an end to it. The main reason is because if a fighter is tested positive, it would create all kind of legal issues. Obviously they feel they have those issues resolved.
Fightlinker.com has the right idea here. There is such a conflict of interest for the UFC on this issue that testing their own fighters actually causes more issees then not. This is why Zuffa is pushing for a UK Commission.
Rampage is only a +180 dog on Sportsbook.com
“According to Dave Meltzer, the UFC was prepared to drug test in England, and at the last minute, the LAWYERS (not Dana White) were the ones who put an end to it. The main reason is because if a fighter is tested positive, it would create all kind of legal issues. Obviously they feel they have those issues resolved.”
Interesting news….did Meltzer mention what kind of legal issues were involved?
Personally, I don’t see why the UFC cannot start to do their own testing in addition to whatever athletic commissions want to do. That will get rid of any and all questions. It’s not like there’s not all sorts of precedents available from other pro sports that adminster their own tests and suspensions (ie, NFL, MLB, NHL, etc etc).
The major differences in those cases is that they each have unions to protect the athletes. UFC doesn’t.
Honestly, I would rather see a system in place where we have one major organization, along with a fighters union, and then completely get rid of the athletic commissions. Of course, that won’t be happening anytime soon.
I LOOOOVE Mike Zambidis-san but Drago is gonna step all over him :(!
Lawlz at Zuffa implementing their own independent lab testing. People shat themselves hard enough when it flew under the radar for a while that Diego got busted for smoking pot, I can only imagine the fall out when Dana Warbucks doesn’t hang and lynch his fighters for testing positive for Pepto.
Can’t wait to see how Sherdog does with ESPN
Most likely it’ll just be embedded result articles. I bet Dana White is not impressed that ESPN is going with Sherdog rather than the setup they got going on at NBCSports.