ESPN.com is reporting that two congressmen responsible for conducting steroid hearings into Major League Baseball have now requested that World Wrestling Entertainment’s Vince McMahon provide records pertaining to the WWE’s wellness testing policies.
Rep. Henry Waxman (chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) and Tom Davis (ranking minority member) both asked McMahon to provide a series of documents intended to give the committee and its investigation a detailed look at WWE’s drug-testing policy, including information about the results of performance-enhancing drug tests on pro wrestlers, in a three-page letter dated on Friday.
Here are some highlights from the letter sent to Vince McMahon:
“The tragic deaths of World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit and his family have raised questions about reports of widespread use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs by professional wrestlers.
These allegations — which include first-hand reports of steroid use by prominent former wrestlers — have swirled around the WWE for over a decade. Investigations by journalists have described a culture of performance-enhancing drug use in professional wrestling, high fatality rates among young professional wrestlers, and an inability or unwillingness of WWE to address these problems.
WWE has a responsibility to do everything possible to eliminate the use of performance-enhancing drugs — or the perception of such use — by its wrestlers.”
The records requested by the congressmen including a list of drugs covered by its policies, the entity that conducts its drug testing, the number of tests it conducts annually, the protocols followed after a positive test and the procedures for awarding exemptions.
Also requested is hard figures about the number of tests conducted by WWE each year, the number of wrestlers tested, positive results for each specific drug and the number of positive tests for which wrestlers were penalized.
The following was issued by World Wrestling Entertainment today: The media has provided us with a copy of a letter from the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. We are reviewing this letter and will respond accordingly.
