Damned if they don’t, damned if they do.
That’s the feeling I had at the conclusion of Wednesday’s Ultimate Fighting Championship news conference on performance-enhancing drugs.
For years, observers of mixed martial arts have scoffed at the UFC’s seemingly lackadaisical efforts to control PEDs. Rightly so. While it was never an official stance, it felt like the promotion didn’t care so much about PEDs in mixed martial arts unless it affected their bottom line.
Even then, Dana White famously trumpeted they were regulated by the government, as though those were the magic words that eliminated all of the tough questions about drugs and testing for drugs and whether or not a good portion of the UFC roster took PEDs.
The line about “the government” was intended to silence critics, but it had the opposite effect. Commissions around North America routinely suspend fighters for just nine months for their first offense. That includes the Nevada Athletic Commission, long considered one of the gold standards in athletic regulation.
A nine-month suspension is barely a deterrent for a fighter trying to determine if the risk of taking PEDs is worth the reward of moving up the ladder more quickly and making more money.
Waiting on athletic commissions to clean up the sport was just another way of passing the buck, and fans knew it. They harped on the mostly easy punishments for those who were caught. They demanded more testing. They wanted a clean sport.
On Wednesday, the UFC took a drastic and responsible step. Spurred on by recent high-profile test failures, they decided to take matters into their own hands. To underscore the seriousness of the situation, they placed Lorenzo Fertitta and Zuffa chief operating officer Lawrence Epstein on a dais with White, and they promised to clean up the sport.
Fertitta revealed that beginning July 1, every fighter on the roster would be subject to random drug testing.
But the moment Fertitta revealed he would be supportive of two- or four-year punishments for test failures was the moment everything changed. I do not imagine we’ll ever see a four-year suspension for a PED failure in mixed martial arts. As of January 1, WADA code allows for four years, but it’s also designed for Olympic athletes.
Four years essentially prevents cheaters from competing at one Olympic Games; in mixed martial arts, a four-year suspension would instantly end many careers.
I believe we’ll see the UFC settle on a two-year suspension for first-time offenders. And make no mistake: if they follow through with what they promised to do, the UFC will have one of the gold standards for sports drug testing in North America.
It will instantly change the sport.
Fighters will change weight classes. Fighters who once dominated will perhaps not be as good as they once were. If the UFC follows through, the sport will look drastically different in 18 months than it does today.
So the UFC announces that they’ll be seeking longer suspensions that will serve as true deterrents for cheaters. They announced that they’ll do random testing for their entire roster. In short, they promised to do everything we always wanted them to do. It should have been cause for celebration, especially for those who would prefer mixed martial arts to be a truly clean sport.
One look at Twitter would tell you the opposite.
Granted, Twitter is a fickle beast. It is far cooler to complain about things on Twitter than it is to be positive. I get it. On Twitter, negativity thrives, and the positive stuff dies on the vine. I used to be that guy, the one who tweeted snarky stuff. I got reactions and retweets and favorites, and those felt important. They felt like validation. A lot of people share that same mindset, and so you see plenty of negative on Twitter.
But this? This was ridiculous. Before the announcement, the UFC needed to institute random drug testing and longer punishments. If they didn’t, it proved they didn’t care about the sport. They only cared about their bottom line.
After the UFC announced random drug testing and longer punishments, the story suddenly changed. Two or four years was way too severe. Random drug testing was an invasion of privacy. The UFC needed to stop messing with the lives of the fighters on its roster. The fighters needed to form a union to protect their rights (which isn’t a bad idea, in and of itself).
And so on, and so forth.
The UFC is not perfect. During the news conference, White answered a reporter’s question by claiming he never said the UFC was getting rid of their drug testing program.
He did, in fact, say that they were abandoning plans for a random drug testing program. I was sitting in a chair four feet away from White when he revealed the news, which was surprising and came out of nowhere.
He said they weren’t going to do the program because their experience with Cung Le’s botched test showed that the promotion shouldn’t be handling the drug testing side of regulation.
“What we’ll do is we’ll help fund it, so they can do more drug testing,” he said that day. “Our legal department screwed that whole thing up. We’ve got no business handling the regulation.”
When missteps like this happen, White and the UFC should be called on the carpet. They should be critiqued. But they should also be commended when they are clearly taking steps to clean up a drug-addled sport.
Wednesday’s news conference was not the ultimate solution to MMA‘s drug problem. We won’t know for months whether or not Zuffa will follow through with the plan they laid out on Wednesday.
It was, however, a promising start to what might ultimately be a real and positive change in mixed martial arts. And it’s okay to say so, even if it means getting less attention on social media.
Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report
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