With the UFC’s announcement on Monday that it has hired anti-doping crusader Jeff Novitzky to be its vice president of athlete health and performance, the future of the UFC’s approach to drug testing is beginning to come into focus.
The key word there is “beginning.” That’s all this is so far, is a beginning, albeit an aggressive one.
If you’ve heard Novitzky’s name before, it was likely in connection with Barry Bonds and BALCO, both of which he targeted back when he was an IRS agent in the early 2000s. Later, as an agent for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he was involved in investigating Lance Armstrong. (That investigation was eventually closed, with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency finally making the case against Armstrong.)
Clearly, Novitzky is a man who’s not afraid to go after the big fish in his doping investigations. But according to his many critics, it’s his zeal for those investigations and his willingness to bend some rules along the way that makes him a problematic figure.
For instance, take the BALCO case. It began in 2002 when Novitzsky, then an IRS agent with no warrant, began searching through BALCO’s trash, even taking it home with him to continue the hunt in his off hours. According to Jonathan Littman, who wrote extensively about Novitzsky’s investigations of both BALCO and Armstrong, Novitzsky “grossly violated the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unlawful search and seizure. Veteran drug agents later insisted that Novitzky “hated” Bonds and had plans to cash in with a book deal about the investigation.
In fact, Novitzky’s methods for nabbing BALCO might have contributed to the light sentences for those involved, such as BALCO founder Victor Conte, who was eventually sentenced to just four months in prison and four months of house arrest.
“We were going to nail him, big time,” Conte told “The New York Times” in 2007, adding that the government offered him the relatively light plea deal after postponing a hearing that would have focused on Novitsky’s conduct.
Then there’s this, courtesy of The Nation’s Dave Zirin:
“In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, Novitsky marched into the offices of sports-drug testing monolith Comprehensive Drug Testing. Carrying a warrant which authorized him to see the sealed drug tests of just ten baseball players, he paraded out with 4,000 supposedly confidential medical files, including records for every baseball player in the Major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN the Magazine, ‘Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky’s actions a ‘callous disregard’ for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence…’”
Novitzky was also accused of using those records to create a “McCarthyesque” list of baseball players who had allegedly failed Major League Baseball’s supposedly anonymous drug tests in 2003, resulting in a series of leaks that were “probably illegal.”
Now Novitzky will be placed in charge of the UFC’s still-undefined anti-doping program. Or, as the UFC press release announcing his hiring put it, he will “spearhead the development of the organization’s clean initiative education program.”
If you feel like you don’t know what those words mean, you’re not alone. For a program led by a man that the UFC’s own announcement referred to as an “anti-doping expert,” you might expect that program’s name to include words such as “doping” or “drugs” or “testing.”
Instead we get “clean initiative education program,” which sounds like it could just as easily be about encouraging proper hygiene among fighters.
The upside to the UFC’s hiring of a notoriously aggressive anti-doping investigator is that it seems like the opposite problem we might have expected to have. When UFC executives first began making noise about doing their own testing, we worried that it would be more show than substance, a little bit of theatre to quiet concerns that the sport was overrun with performance-enhancing drugs. We worried, in other words, that the UFC would take it too easy on drug cheats, or do too little in an effort to catch and punish them.
If there’s one thing no one’s accused Novitzky of, it’s doing too little or taking it too easy.
There is a potential downside to that, though. In his previous jobs, Novitzsky’s zeal had the external check provided by the courts. If he was violating people’s Fourth Amendment rights in the course of federal investigations, they could make that case to a judge.
With the UFC’s testing program still just a series of vague outlines, we don’t know for sure yet how positive test results might be handled or how users might dispute the UFC’s findings. While we need an anti-doping program with teeth in this sport, we also need to know we’ll be cracking down on the right people, the right way. As the UFC saw when it had to rescind Cung Le’s suspension last year, cutting corners often only erodes the public’s trust.
Not unlike the press conference at which UFC executives acknowledged the need for an enhanced testing program and expressed support for two- or even four-year bans of those caught cheating, this hiring is a bold step by an organization in need of serious action.
Hopefully it also comes with a diligent approach, and a clear, unambiguous plan for addressing the sport’s PED problem. Hopefully, in other words, we get a program that’s more transparent and forthright than “clean initiative education” makes it sound.
For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
Filed under: Featured, News, UFC
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