The Performance-Enhancing Drug (PED) testing topic in boxing devolves into downright lunacy at times. In one corner, you have those who believe there is no issue at all. They fall into two categories, really. Those that don’t believe PEDs are being in used in boxing, and those that simply do not care.
In the other corner, we have social media and online news experts who have parlayed their skills in basic reading, writing and arithmetic to that of a medical degree. These people say they know all the ins and outs of the PED test conundrum. After all, these people are experts.
But maybe there is another corner.
Welterweights Timothy Bradley and Juan Manuel Marquez meet October 12 in Las Vegas. The Top Rank-promoted fight has churned out more PED lunacy than perhaps any other fight to date and maybe for good reason. After Marquez walloped Manny Pacquiao last December under the guidance of strength and conditioning coordinator (and former PED peddler) Angel “Memo” Heredia (aka Angel Hernandez), questions were raised about just how the 39-year-old pulled it off.
Sure, Marquez is a future Hall of Famer, but on this night the former lightweight champion managed to pack the power of Hercules into the right hand that crushed poor Manny Pacquiao into a disheveled heap of nothingness. It was unlike anything he’s done before.
Both men passed the post-fight drug tests, of course. But doubts remained. After all, the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC), the governmental body in charge of doing such things, could only test with the technology they have access to. So despite the clean test, the hubbub from certain media members and fight camps persisted, as did the dark cloud of suspicion over Marquez and Heredia despite there being absolutely no proof they did anything wrong.
Fast forward to today.
When Timothy Bradley signed to meet Marquez in October, he did so believing certain PED testing terms were put into his contract. In fact, the camps continued to bicker about what exactly the contract they signed meant, so much so that Bradley actually threatened to pull out of the fight altogether unless the testing was done by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (VADA) and/or the United States Anti-Doping Association (USADA).
The issue, of course, is that each fighter wanted to use different ones. Bradley preferred signing up with VADA, while Marquez wanted to sign with USADA.
To complicate matters, a USADA spokesperson told TheSweetScience.com last week that USADA would only be involved with fights where both fighters were tested by USADA (meaning each fighter couldn’t each use different testing organizations) and would not partner with any other testing organizations other than the state commissions collecting the samples.
USADA only conducts an anti-doping program when both fighters agree to the rules and requirements to be included in the USADA program,” said Annie Skinner, USADA Media Relations Manager. “USADA will not conduct a testing program while another organization (other than the boxing commission who collects a fight night sample) is testing one or both fighters, as the other organization may not hold the fighters to the same standards as USADA, the athletes may be confused by differing protocols, and because the USADA program is required to remain consistent with the WADA Code and International Standards.
According to BoxingScene’s Bill Emes, this is where Top Rank CEO Bob Arum stepped in to settle the dispute with some good, old-fashioned outside-the-boxing thinking (which might have been planned all along.)
Everything is fine. The Nevada Commission is running the tests. They are taking extensive tests. They started it [on Tuesday]. Everything is in order. The tests by the Nevada Commission will be just as or even more extensive than USADA or VADA. You have to understand that these are the same tests. These organizations may evaluate them differently but the tests are the tests. If you were trained, you could put a needle in somebody and take the blood.
And here, it seems, is where an important step forward for PED testing in boxing just might have occurred.
Here you have a promoter, seeking the best interest (it would seem) of his fighter, Bradley, over his pocketbook. “Extensive PED testing,” as he calls it, is expensive PED testing, and Arum is willing to pay for it. Perhaps, more importantly, the money and oversight of the testing will not go to an outside organization. Rather, the testing will be regulated by the governmental organization charged with the very task of overseeing the bout, the NSAC.
According to TheSweetScience.com, Nevada’s Keith Kizer confirmed the testing would be done at the highest level possible, according to the decider of such things, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). In fact, Kizer said the NSAC will be utilizing one of the only two WADA-accredited labs in the country.
We are utilizing The Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory (SMRTL) in Salt Lake City, Utah, to collect the samples and perform the testing," Kizer said. "The administration is solely being done by the Commission.
What does all this mean? It may mean very much, and boxing scribe Tim Starks probably laid it out best for his column this week at Queensbury-Rules.com.
This is no small matter, given the skepticism about Marquez's power after the Manny Pacquiao knockout and his affiliation with the controversial Memo Heredia. There was doubt in some quarters about whether the NSAC could get its drug testing house up in any short amount of time, and they have. They'll be using the World Anti-Doping Agency standard, NSAC's Keith Kizer told me, which would also mean a 4:1 T/E ratio rather than Nevada's 6:1 standard. If the NSAC would confirm it was using CIR (sorry for the jargon), then pretty much all of the biggest questions would be off the table -- the T/E and CIR issues had been two of the biggest knocks on the potential adequacy of NSAC's testing compared to, say, the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association. Kizer, alas, has not answered whether CIR will be used, which strikes me as a misstep, but the boss of the lab Nevada is using, the Sports Medicine and Research Testing Laboratory, has come out in favor of CIR, which is encouraging.
So perhaps boxing has finally and truly taken a serious step toward solving its PED testing issue, if only for a fleeting moment. Why? Because it is precisely the state commissions who are supposed to protect the fighters from those who would abuse the sport through PED use, and it will absolutely have to be the promoters who help them pay for it.
Anything less, at least right now, devolves into either wishing there wasn’t any problem at all or relying on fighters to volunteer (and sometimes pay for) the PED testing themselves.
And that just seems crazy.
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