The founder and president of BALCO, a sports nutrition center in California, Victor Conte, says that the culprit for the issue of Cung Le's drug test fiasco is UFC's mismanagement of Le's case and outlines multiple discrepancies.
It can be remembered that Le was found to have failed the test done by the governing body of the UFC but after further investigation, they found out several flaws in the UFC's testing process.
But after some deliberation his one-year suspension due to testing positive for excess levels of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) in a post-fight drug test following his fourth-round TKO loss to Michael Bisping at UFC Fight Night 48 has been revoked by the UFC. This is according to the promotion officials.
Conte narrated through MMAWeekly his thoughts on the trail of events that lead to Le's positive testing then his suspension and revoking of it.
He said "Well, what's interesting here is, and I'm going to point out the specifics; these things I want to point out to you illustrate the incompetence of the UFC and their understanding of PED testing and how they are just not presenting the facts as Cung, and I, and Gary (Ibarra, Le's manager) know them to be."
"We'll start with the very first sentence, 'at UFC Fight Night Macao on August 23rd, the UFC contracted with an independent drug testing laboratory in Hong Kong to perform urinalysis testing on all fighters on the card.' Well, let me say this, first of all, there was no urine testing done by the Hong Kong lab for Cung Le. That's just a false statement; it's not true. We have copies of the test results and Quest Diagnostic Laborites, specifically the lab in Kansas, and they took the urine samples for Cung at least, and everything that Cung has received from the UFC. They did pre and post analysis on his urine samples and they looked at the complete battery of anabolic steroids, stimulants, cocaine, marijuana, the whole battery that they do. And, the interesting part is even on that it says that this is a pre-employment (drug test)."
"So, first of all, the basic information saying urine samples by all fighters on the card were done at the Hong Kong lab. That is just simply false regarding Cung Le, because the results that we have say Quest Diagnostic Laborites in Kansas. So, they start out by providing misinformation, the first sentence is just factually wrong. The second sentence in part exposes why the UFC should not be doing their own testing, and whoever is advising them. The second sentence reads, 'additionally the UFC requested the laboratory to test blood samples from four fighters for human growth hormone (HGH), erythropoietin (EPO), and testosterone.' Now, let's take a look at that test by test. Yes, WADA approved laboratories do testing of human growth hormone on blood samples, but they don't do total human growth hormone concentration test by itself, but I'm sure you've read they do the isoform test, the biomarker test, and the serum IGF-1 test. So, it's like a table has to have at least three legs in order for it to stand up and they didn't even do any of the three legs on the testing. They looked at something for clinical purposes, as other scientists have said, like (Dr.) Don Catlin and others, the test is worthless, it's useless, ignore it. What they did is not an anti-doping test, the growth hormone test they did."
