These days, it seems like when a fighter tests positive, it’s a race to the supplement story to try to find something, anything, that’s been tainted with whatever they test positive for. It’s not super uncommon for off-the-shelf supplements to have banned substances in them, even if it’s not mentioned on the label. We’re not accusing anyone of doing this in any specific cases, but it certainly seems like ‘something that happens sometimes’. If a fighter and their camp can prove that whatever they tested positive for is also found in an off-the-shelf supplement, USADA will go and buy that supplement and test it. That doesn’t mean the fighter necessarily got the banned substance from said supplement by mistake, they still could have been juicing, but it gives them an avenue to defend themselves by saying they had no idea what they were taking since the supplement was tainted.
The tainted supplement defense needs to be eliminated. Fighters are responsible for what goes into their body. If that means testing every new package of supplements you take, so be it. When so many people are failing tests, and blaming it on mistakes with their supplements, when is enough enough? There are fighters who refuse to take any supplements for this very reason. You never know when something else can get mixed in with a new batch, or when a machine goes from making one supplement to another one and isn’t cleaned out properly. It happens often enough that fighters need to be more careful, and we need to stop accepting the tainted supplement excuse otherwise it gives a carte blanche for people to cheat and find loopholes to get away with it.
Page 2 of 2:
