USADA CEO Travis Tygart Discusses Lesnar’s UFC Suspension, Positive Test Results Coming After Fights, More

MMA Fighting has released a new interview with USADA CEO Travis Tygart.

We have included the excerpt from the interview where Tygart is asked about Brock Lesnar and his UFC suspension following UFC 200 below.

The full article can be read HERE.

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MR: It’s been more than a year now, but the Brock Lesnar situation with the UFC exempting him from four months of testing has been one of the hot-button topics of the UFC’s policy and USADA. Are there any regrets about how some of that played out? Do you feel like USADA or the UFC made any missteps in dealing with that? It led to some bad PR at the very least and it also led to a lawsuit by Mark Hunt.

TT: I don’t ever want a situation where an athlete has a positive test that gets reported after the event or one that’s collected the night after and gets reported. Nobody is in favor of that. Unfortunately, that’s a necessary part sometimes if athletes are going to make the decision to cheat, because any good year-round testing program is going to test them after the event as well as in the days leading up to the event.

Sometimes if they cheat, it’s inevitable. I don’t like the fact that they cheated. I don’t like any more that they were able to fight and it gets reported after. But sometimes we have to just appreciate a year-round program, that’s gonna happen.

We don’t want that, we don’t like that. That doesn’t instill confidence in them in the system. We want to avoid that every time, if we possibly can. But not at the expense of not testing. And that’s the balance. The only option to avoid that if someone is gonna make the decision to cheat is to just have a two-week, three-week window of no testing, and that is just not going to happen. That’s not an effective program. Someone can go and cheat and we would never know about it.