Frank Mir Says USADA Testing Is Too Strict

In an interview with ESPN’s Five Rounds podcast, Frank Mir spoke about the testing of the USADA, which he said is too strict. He mentioned the failure of Tim Means in February but was only suspended for six months after proving it was due to a tainted supplement. Here are highlights:

On how strict the USADA is: “I think it’s actually nailing a lot of guys it seems that aren’t trying to do anything wrong to begin with. [There are] a lot of good examples of people – what about Tim Means? There’s a situation where somebody kind of got screwed that really wasn’t doing anything wrong or trying to really circumvent the system.”

On why so many fighters are getting caught: “I think now you have USADA is in the business of trying to catch as many people as they can and they’re trying to make the tests as sensitive as possible even before the tests are really plausible as far as, ‘well have you ruled out any other situations that could cause a false positive?’ And they come forward with the tests before that’s conclusive because they want to justify their paycheck at the end of the day. I think they’re in a situation where not that many people are really trying to cheat so now they’re trying to make the tests so extensive that they can find the minutest molecule someone might come in contact with but in a lot of situations, to really tell someone that they’re responsible for everything that enters into their body – we’ve already seen situations like Yoel Romero and Tim Means are buying supplements from the store and they’re getting in trouble. Then overseas guys eating tainted meats and now all of a sudden they test positive for clenbuterol. It’s overboard I think.”

On the situation the testing has created: “I think right now we’re losing a lot of fighters. We lost Machida because he forgot to put something on his paperwork, B.J. Penn didn’t understand the new testing and took an IV months before the fight, not even a weight cutting situation. So I think we’re losing a lot of main event fighters to situations that are not actually cheating. I think you see that in a lot of movements. First, you have something that’s not enough and then sometimes the response is overboard. I think right now we’re in the overboard status of our drug testing policy. I think that eventually, hopefully, it will come back to the middle where the tests are really trying to nail people that are trying to cheat or circumvent the system and not just somebody that happened to drink a protein shake at the local gym that wasn’t cleaned out well enough and the last guy put creatine in there or something and now it blows up his test.”