Mir: USADA is going overboard

UFC heavyweight Frank Mir appeared recently on Brett Okamoto’s Five Rounds podcast and discussed the US Anti-Doping Agency. USADA is the UFC’s independent drug test body, and in April it notified Mir that his most-recent test had been flagged for flagged for metabolites for Oral Turinabol.

The test was administered following his fight with Mark Hunt at UFC Fight Night 85 on March 20, 2016, in Brisbane, Australia. Mir suggested that tainted kangaroo meat could have been the source.

You put it on the food and you bulk up your livestock,” he said. “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… now in four months he’s bigger than he’s ever going to be and you slaughter him.”

Unfortunately, kangaroo meat in Australia is not farmed. It is in fact the world’s largest consumptive mammalian wildlife industry. For the theory to work, a farmer would have run around the outback giving TBol to wild kangaroos and then come back and find the jacked ones and kill them.

Mir never pursued the theory, citing a lack of resources. Although he has not had his formal hearing with USADA, it is believed he will be suspended for two years, until April of 2018. As well, Mir was removed from his analyst position at FOX Sports.

“I think it’s actually nailing a lot of guys it seems that aren’t trying to do anything wrong to begin with,’ said Mir, as transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting. “[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.

“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.”

“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.”

Although Mir has previously said that a two-year suspension from USADA would effectively be the end of his fighting career, he now says he wants to fight on.

“I do,” he said. “I’m assuming that eventually two years will hit and maybe at that point.”