With Accurate HGH Testing on the Horizon, Will Zuffa Take Notice?

Last week I wrote my own little piece on pain, and then fell into a modest depression when I read David Epstein's obviously superior work on the same topic (brilliantly summarized by Jonathan Snowden the other day). It's not that I expect to write work on par with a real (and great) journalist, but that as ever evolving as the process of blogging is, it's still just blogging: without a connection to the inside tract, and a comprehensive network of contacts, peers, and supervisors, it's the difference between the production of content versus the reflection of content. Whining aside, there was something else David Epstein wrote on Monday worth talking about. 

When it comes to drug testing, the discussion that has dominated the MMA landscape has been Testosterone Replacement Therapy. Chael Sonnen exposed us to it with a dog and pony show at the California State Athletic Commission about hypogonadism (with Dr. Seth Putnam providing testimony). Then Nate Marquardt further illuminated the issue after scrapping a UFC main event, and getting a pink slip for his failures.

I've never been one to be overly critical of Zuffa. Where business decisions have been murky on the surface at times, I've often felt the benefit of the doubt was appropriate (the Pride buyout, given the context at the time, was less a nefarious powerplay in my opinion, and more a gamble without the intended payoff). But where the criticism has been warranted, is in the area of sport image.

While Lorenzo Ferttita has been a bit more direct (by comparison at least) than Dana White on the issue of drug testing, Dana himself always falls back on the "our hands are tied behind our back" defense, pretending that athletic commissions are omnipotent (despite frequently overruling their judgment with win bonuses for fighters who lost*), and Zuffa is helpless. Zuffa is many things: "helpless" is not one of them. While TRT has been the topic 'de jour' in relation to performance enhancement, it neglects the buffet of PED's at an athlete's disposal: namely HGH. 

In the past, the problem with HGH has been being able to test it. When British Rugby player, Terry Newton, became the first player last year to ever test positive for HGH, the future of drug testing began to offer some hope. That hope continues:

The reason that there were no positives was because the test was so insensitive that a cheating athlete could have taken HGH with his breakfast and been clean by dinner. HGH naturally comes in three different "isoforms," or structures, each with a different weight. The primary forms weigh 20 kilodaltons and 22 kilodaltons. But synthetic HGH comes only in the 22-kilodalton variety. So when an athlete injects HGH, the drug upsets the normal ratio of HGH isoforms in the body, and that is what the test depends on. If an athlete's ratio is out of whack, then he or she may have injected HGH.

The trouble in years past, though, was that anti-doping scientists didn't have a great bead on what the range of normal ratios looked like, so they had to be careful about declaring a test positive. Thus, the threshold for a positive test required a ratio that was abnormal by about six-fold compared to what is natural in the body. And because the human body corrects the ratio swiftly after HGH injection, there was a miniscule window of time when an athlete could actually have an isoform ratio that was askew enough to cause a positive test.

But in early 2010, that began to change. Anti-doping scientists had collected enough data on the normal human range of HGH isoform ratios to cut in half the threshold that triggers a positive test. That also extended the window for catching a cheater by at least a day, and perhaps two.

The director for the World Anti Doping Agency in Montreal continues with the statement that "en even better test" could be ready next summer. No matter how reluctantly, the National Football League is getting on board with these programs; programs that the NFL Player's Association has agreed to include random blood testing as part of the new collective bargaining agreement, which finally reached a conclusion last week.

The UFC has traditionally taken cues from professional wrestling, both in structure, and sometimes in form. But they need to start taking cues from real sports, since that is their intention. While I think MMA is a niche sport by design, and therefore not capable of hitting some fantasy ceiling of popularity, there are still uncharted areas for the UFC to explore, and the first step is full fledged legalization.

That kind of legalization won't come cheap, or without provocation. The UFC still suffers from an identity crisis. What's worked for them in the past, and what continues to work for them is their unique place in the sports world: Zuffa lives in a Wild West of a media landscape, with its businessmen playing the role of William 'Curly Bill' Brocius. Before setting a foot in the mainstream sand, they better make sure they leave their spurs, and six shooters behind.   

*I don't have a problem with this at all (especially since most of them involve Leonard Garcia): my only point here is to highlight Dana's hypocrisy.