The Biogenesis scandal that rocked baseball, with several players named as clients of the high-end performance enhancing drug outfit, may now reach mixed martial arts as well.
According to a new report from ESPN, former Biogenesis employee Porter Fischer now says that the athletes involved with the company included MMA fighters as well as professional boxers.
Fischer was the whistleblower that originally provided documents to a Miami newspaper naming several high profile players, including former MLB MVPs Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez, as clients.
Fischer has yet to name names and in the same report was quoted as turning down a sum of $125,000 to cooperate with Major League Baseball, would only speak in broad terms as far as the sports involved with the company.
Fischer worked directly with Biogenesis founder Tony Bosch, who has been working in coordination with Major League Baseball on the investigation. Fischer says that Biogenesis worked with athletes in numerous sports beyond just baseball, with some relationships going back as far as 2009. (via ESPN)
Fischer said he and associates have identified athletes from the NBA, NCAA, professional boxing, tennis and MMA, in addition to other professional baseball players who have not yet been identified. As far as he knows, he said, Bosch had no clients from the NFL or NHL.
The investigation into Biogenesis by Major League Baseball has already resulted in a few suspensions—most notably Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, who was suspended for the remainder of this season after he was named as a client.
According to additional reports from the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, Braun and other players received synthetic testosterone from Biogenesis in several possible different forms.
Braun actually tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone in a test done in 2011, but ended up without a suspension after he argued that the sample taken was mishandled in delivery to the testing lab.
Now two years later, Braun has been suspended for his involvement with a company supplying synthetic testosterone to players.
As of yet, no names have been given in the Biogenesis investigation in regards to which MMA fighters were potentially involved with the company.
In Braun’s case, he was on the books owing in the neighborhood of $20,000 to $30,000 for his treatments, so the cost of the drugs wasn’t cheap by any means.
While Major League Baseball continues to deal with the fallout from the Biogenesis scandal, it’s unclear if the UFC or other major MMA promotions will do the same kind of digging, or hand down suspensions if fighters are named in the documents.
Biogenesis was a Miami based company, but many of their high profile clients named in the documents handed out by Fischer were not from the Florida area.
Florida does house some of the top MMA camps in the sport, but it’s unknown if they had any involvement with the company or how high up in the scope of the sport any potentially-involved fighters are.
Fischer, along with Bosch, could reveal those names at any time, but as of now none have been revealed.
Damon Martin is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report
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