(Awful clip-art via SportsNickel)
If you follow baseball, you may already be aware of the ongoing Biogenesis scandal. In short, an ex-employee of a Miami-based steroid clinic leaked hundreds of pages of documents from the clinic to the Miami New Times earlier this year, identifying several big-name MLB players as clients. The Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun has already been suspended for the rest of this season, and A-Rod’s suspension is imminent. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), Biogenesis’s shady operation wasn’t limited to baseball. From a new ESPN report:
The man who turned the Biogenesis clinic from a quiet investigation in Miami into a national scandal says there are at least a dozen more athletes whose names haven’t been exposed and that they come from across the sports world.
Porter Fischer, the former Biogenesis of Miami clinic employee who turned boxes of documents over to the Miami New Times last year, declined to name the athletes. But in his first television interview, Fischer told “Outside the Lines” that numerous sports had at least one athlete who received performance-enhancing drugs from clinic founder Tony Bosch.
“This isn’t a 2013 thing or a 2012 thing; some of these people have been on the books since 2009,” Fischer said.
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, Fischer said, Bosch had no clients from the NFL or NHL…
The athletes not yet publicly named come from the documents Fischer took from the clinic, documents he said another employee asked him to take for safekeeping. The number of athletes involved with the clinic, based on what he saw and heard during his time with Biogenesis, is far more than people realize, he said.
“In just the four years that I know, it’s got to be well over a hundred, easy,” he said. “It’s almost scary to think about how many people have gone through [Bosch’s treatments] and how long he’s gotten away with this.”
Bosch has been cooperating with MLB for more than a month, providing what sources have said are extensive records of his connection to 20 to 25 players.
In his own report on BloodyElbow, Brent Brookhouse offered some insight worth noting:
Speaking purely speculatively, I doubt that anyone involved with a high end, designer drug outfit like Biogenesis is some low or mid-card dwelling fringe UFC talent. The costs involved here are likely so high that it would seem likely that anyone involved would be much more high profile than that.
So…Miami-based clinic. High-profile MMA fighters with money to spend. Hmm. To avoid another unnecessary lawsuit, we’re not going to connect the dots for you, but there are a few fighters who immediately come to mind. We’ll update you when these fighters are named. And if that happens, the UFC will get the most unwelcome kind of mainstream media attention. Brace yourselves for the incoming shitstorm.