Barnett not impressed with USADA bureaucracy

On September 3, 2016, former UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett won fight of the night and a performance bonus in beating fellow former champ Andrei Arlovski. About to turn 40 and hit his 20th year fighting, The Warmaster was looking great.

However, in December he had a test flagged for ostarine. Barnett was offered an 18-month suspension by USADA. He knew Tim Means had tested positive for ostarine due to a contaminated supplement and received a six-month suspension. But the fighter requested an independent arbitrator and paid for his supplements to be tested. Those results came back last spring.

Eventually, Barnett was given no suspension, but rather received a public reprimand. However, that happened last week. For all of 2017, and 2018 up to now, in the closing years of his career, Josh Barnett was prohibited from fighting. During a recent interview with Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting, the fighter reflected on what happened. While respectful, Josh Barnett is not impressed.

The concept of USADA is not bad, said Barnett. And the idea of creating something that has protocol and process also, inherently these are not bad things. But if that’s the case, it has to be something that the people that are under its auspices need to do reasonably and effectively. Luckily, I had a very good connection with a prominent lawyer that could help me out. I had people that could help me through this process. But it cost me money, it cost me money to have supplements tested to show that there was a problem. It cost me money to go all the way to arbitration. … It wasn’t just the money I paid, it’s also the time that I paid out of this.

I don’t have any problems with these sort of things. But I have a problem with getting to this solution, finding the issue, only to then get put into a position where no one wants to relent. One of the greatest struggles of bureaucracies is they get built and created, but they design themselves in such a way that they can never be at fault. They can never be wrong, they can never have made a mistake and they never want to relent. And they will do almost everything in their power to make sure you were the offending party, that you were wrong, at all costs.

I’m glad that things worked out this way, but I’m not glad that it got to this point. I’m not here to bury USADA, either. I think the intent is noble.

This has been a very difficult element in my career at this point and I’m just glad that I can get back to what I do best and that’s kicking the crap out of people and not having to go into arbitration settings or any kind of courtrooms to show how good I am at making an argument.