The Ultimate Fight Championship (UFC) President Dana White has struggled to defend the anti-doping efforts of the UFC. White recently asserted that the UFC was at forefront of the movement to eradicate performance-enhancing drugs from sports.
“We do more than any other sports organization on the planet,” said White.
Unfortunately, White’s comments were designed solely for public relations purposes. The assertion that the UFC does more than any other sport to fight steroids is demonstrably false.
White claimed that it was impossible to implement random drug testing in the UFC. The burden of keeping track of the whereabouts of its 375 athletes on a year-round basis was too onerous a task to undertake.
“We’ve got 375 guys under contract,” White said. “We’re doing a zillion fights a year, traveling all over the world, all these other things that we’re doing. Now, you really think that we can crack down and fucking chase these guys around everywhere they live all over the world and just randomly test these guys all the time?”
While White thinks it is impossible to account for the whereabouts of its 375 MMA fighters, several sports have done that with its athletes. They have successfully implemented the random testing requirement set forth by the WADA Code. And they monitor the whereabouts of steroid-tested athletes year-round.
Either White intended to mislead a gullible media about the state of doping in the UFC or he is blissfully ignorant of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Code.
Travis Tygart, the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), previously told the media that he thinks the UFC has actively avoided agreeing to the WADA Code.
“Not only are they not WADA Code compliant they have fought tooth and nail not to have any principles of the WADA Code,” said Tygart. “It’s a joke that they claim they are trying to protect their sport with WADA policies. Make no mistake, rules that apply to UFC in the states are horrific in comparison to the WADA Code.”
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