Mir questions validity of B sample test

USADA, the UFC’s independent drug testing service, announced in early April that former heavyweight Frank Mir had been flagged for a potential anti-doping violation, following his fight with Mark Hunt at UFC Fight Night 85 on March 20, 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. The fighter immediately posted a firm denial on his social network that he had knowingly used PEDs.

Mir then discussed the flagged test at length on his Phonebooth Fightjng Podcast, repeating that he did not knowingly take PEDs, noting that he had passed two random drug tests previously, and revealing that he was flagged for metabolites for Oral Turinabol.

Mir speculated that among the things that could have led to a failed test was ingesting kangaroo meat in Australia.

“I couldn’t tell you a single restaurant I remember eating at,” said Mir as transcribed by Lewis Mckeever for BE. “I even remember calling James and saying ‘do you remember where we ate?’ I had to write down all of the places we went. And even if I could figure it out; let’s say someone could document where I went. You’re telling me USADA are gonna go down, and, on my behalf, try to test all the different meats to see if, well, you know, kanagaroos are wild and this guy wanted to beef em’ up so he bought something that was very abundant – in the study that I did – Oral Turinabol could be bought in powdered form.

“You put it on the food and you bulk up your livestock, and you could sell it into the stores because now you get more bang for your buck. An animal that takes two years to reach maturity, you know, muscle weight, now in four months he’s bigger than he’s ever gonna be and you slaughter him. It’s a common practice. I don’t know, I’m not pointing the finger any where, I’m just saying there’s so many loopholes for me to sit there and go ‘where did it come from?’ Hell man, I don’t know, I really don’t. All I know is that I didn’t willingly take anything.”

However, kangaroo meat in Australia is not farmed. It is in fact the world’s largest consumptive mammalian wildlife industry. So while Mir could have taken it in a tainted supplement, the kangaroo meat theory is vanishingly unlikely, and would require a farmer to head out into the bush and then feed kangaroos steroids, and then find the same giant kangaroos and harvest them.

Further, if a farmer did decide to dope kangaroos, he likely wouldn’t use Oral Turabinol. TBol was created by an East German pharmaceutical company in the 1960. It is marketed and sold only by clandestine laboratories via the black market. There is no pharmaceutical or veterinarian production of this drug. (Source)

Mir had requested that the B sample too be tested. It, too, came back positive. The fighter returned to the kangaroo theory again on his Phone Booth Fighting podcast, noting that NFL player Duane Brown recently failed a PED test apparently caused by tainted meat consumed in Mexico. It was beef for the record, not kangaroo.

“Giving the animals [drugs] is not really unheard of, especially that — turinabol is extremely popular in Australia,” said Mir, as transcribed MMA Fighting. “So to give it to the animals to bulk them up, that way you make more money when it comes to bring that animal in to be butchered. It sounds awful, but I’m listening to it, trying to go back, trying to figure that out.

“As somebody that doesn’t have access to the laboratories that the NFL has access to, and I don’t want [a failed test] to happen to anybody else, but it’s basically going to be a situation where it has to occur to a few other guys and then maybe something will be spotted. But right now, me being the lone guy that came out of the card with that situation to happen with metabolites, I don’t see a situation where they are going to really look into any further, and where would I even begin to try to figure it out.”

“My only kind of thought to that, and if someone wants to maybe write us and correct me, but obviously part of the procedure was that I had the right to be there in person where it was tested at. I asked for it to be sent a different lab, and that’s not the case. It gets tested at the same lab. Since I couldn’t be there, they appointed one of the other lab techs as my representative.

“But here’s my thought on that: you and I work for a lab, you do a test on a guy and let’s say you messed up, that somehow it came back the wrong test. Now I’m your co-worker and I’m going to run the test on the same thing. It came out of our lab, we work for the same company – this lab – even if I found that you made an error, am I really going to go ahead and go, ‘oh man, hey, you know that guy you just got suspended for two years and might have ended his career? You screwed up. Our whole lab messed up. Oh my God, yeah, let’s go ahead and let’s bring that to light real quick.’

“I would think having a test at the same lab is a conflict of interest.”

Mir faces a two year suspension, and is 36, and has been fighting for 15 years. He has said if he receives the full suspension, then that is likely the end of his career. Given that the kangaroo meat theory is highly unlikely to sway USADA into lessening the suspension, this may be the end of an extraordinary career, finishing not with a bang, but with blather about kangaroos.