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On USADA’s third anniversary with UFC, complicated questions abound

A few weeks before it took effect, UFC Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance Jeff Novitzky stood up at a press conference at the Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa in Las Vegas and called the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency anti-doping program the “most comprehensive, effective, best program in all of professional sport.”

Then on July 1, 2015, that program actually went into effect in the UFC. It was hard to know what to expect, but the general mood was cautiously optimistic. Three years and several high-profile cases later, a skeptical unease has settled in.

Some of that is just the nature of the situation. Anti-doping programs, even when they’re working well, aren’t exactly heroic. Their successes are too likely to remain hidden. Their failures are all too public.

We don’t hear about all the fighters who got clean or never got dirty solely because they feared the long arm of USADA. We do hear about all the questionable suspensions and claims of contamination.

But there are legitimate concerns, too.

When Lyoto Machida gets an 18-month suspension for a relatively harmless substance that he admitted to taking simply because he didn’t realize it was on the banned list, it forces us to wonder whether the punishment fits the crime.

When Josh Barnett exits the UFC after months of battling USADA in what was eventually ruled a minor case of accidental contamination, it’s hard not to ask if we’re focusing our energy on the right things for the right reasons.

Then there are those rules that the UFC is allowed to selectively ignore, as it did when it wanted Brock Lesnar back in the cage without waiting through the full testing window to be sure he was clean. Turned out he wasn’t, not that it’s hindered his career or future MMA prospects in the slightest.

There are a number of concerns about transparency in the USADA program. Those concerns aren’t limited to USADA’s work with the UFC, either, as a recent dust-up over a failed attempt to test tennis star Serena Williams revealed.

But along with questions about how the program is implemented have come questions about whether we want it at all.

The UFC didn’t spend “multiple millions of dollars,” in the words of former CEO Lorenzo Fertitta, simply because it felt like it had too much cash sitting around. When the UFC signed the deal with USADA and then quickly implemented it, it was intended to address a problem.

In the years and months prior, doping questions hounded the UFC. First there was the TRT era, which saw more and more fighters showing up with doctor’s notes for synthetic testosterone. When pressed about whether the company was doing enough to ensure that steroid-fueled fighters weren’t cheating their way to glory, UFC President Dana White liked to point out that the UFC was regulated by “the government.”

Of course, in some places it wasn’t regulated by any sanctioning body at all. A little more than six months before the UFC implemented the USADA program, it had been forced to backpedal from an allegation of HGH use against middleweight Cung Le after it was revealed that the UFC had hired an occupational drug testing lab in Hong Kong which proved to be woefully unsuited to the task.

Clearly, the UFC needed help. State athletic commissions had too much variation in their rules and resources and competence. Self-regulation was a practical and ethical minefield. It needed reliable third-party testing. That’s where USADA came in.

But now we wonder whether the program is really catching dopers or just unsophisticated supplement users. We wonder if the focus is on getting it right or just heaping on the suspensions. We even wonder whether a clean sport is worth all this trouble, especially if it means more injury withdrawals or weigh-in misses.

These aren’t simple questions, so maybe we shouldn’t expect easy answers. But as the UFC’s USADA era stretches into a fourth year of uneasy operations, that doesn’t mean we should stop asking.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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