UFC fIghters must detail location at all times, months in advance
“It is an inconvenience, but it’s necessary. In order to run a good program and be able to test 365 days a year, it’s one of the sacrifices our athletes need to make.”
UFC vice president of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and explained that UFC fighters will have to inform USADA of whereabouts three months in advance under new the anti-doping program.
Every three months fighters have to detail their schedule for the coming quarter, noting where they are overnight, and where they are during the day (gym, job, school, etc). Any changes can be made readily using a mobile app. The process is so that fighters can be subjected to random, comprehensive, out-of-competition drug testing.
The first time a fighter fails to identify where he or she is merits a call from Novitzky. Second strikes Novitzky flies to where the fighter is, and “trails” them for a day or two, to make sure they are filling the app in correctly. Third time the fighter faces sanctions.
“That’s gonna be, I think, a big part of my role coming up,” said Novitzky as transcribed by Marc Raimondi for MMAFighting.com.
“It is an inconvenience, but it’s necessary. In order to run a good program and be able to test 365 days a year, it’s one of the sacrifices our athletes need to make, so that they can tell the world that we have the strongest anti-doping program in it.”
“This program wants to catch the intentional cheaters. But we also have to have things in place so that if an athlete says, ‘I’m not gonna fill out my whereabouts or it’s not gonna be accurate, I don’t really care about it,’ we need to prevent that from happening.”
Novitzky said the UFC’s anti-doping program under USADA is the “most comprehensive” in sports worldwide.
