"Fighting Words" - On Francisco Vargas’ Positive Drug Test

by David P. Greisman

The number of pro athletes who’ve been guilty has led to an even greater number of them being guilty by association.

Our eyes have long since been opened to the use of performance-enhancing drugs in seemingly every sport and at seemingly every level, often to get more out of training so as to get more out of themselves on the field, in the pool, on the track, in the ring and wherever else competition is taking place. We know that many more beyond those who’ve been caught have turned to taking, well, whatever it takes to get ahead — or to keep from falling behind.

And so when an athlete tries to come up with an excuse for testing positive, we have a hard time believing it’s anything more than grasping at straws and trying to save face. The court of public opinion isn’t one in which guilt needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This court has also been conditioned to have many reasonable doubts about the excuses of the accused.

We’ve heard it all before. That’s why last week’s news that junior lightweight titleholder Francisco Vargas had tested positive for a banned substance — and his team’s subsequent explanation, and then the response from his promoter and the athletic commission — raised eyebrows.

Vargas, who’s supposed to fight Orlando Salido on June 4 in California, came up positive for the steroid clenbuterol under testing done by the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association, or VADA. Various articles have noted that Vargas requested VADA testing for this bout; Salido believes it is because of his own positive test for a steroid back in 2006. More pro fighters have been insisting on additional testing beyond what little is done by athletic commissions. And the World Boxing Council, whose belt Vargas holds, had contracted with VADA to do testing on its behalf.

Golden Boy Promotions, which promotes Vargas, subsequently put out a statement saying its fighter “believes he tested positive due to ingesting contaminated meat in Mexico, where clenbuterol is commonly used by ranchers in livestock feed.” The statement said nothing about the Salido fight being off. And the California State Athletic Commission soon met to discuss what it would do about the situation.

Its decision? To allow the fight to go on so long as Vargas passed even more tests, which the fighter would have to pay for.

The commission’s executive director, Andy Foster, said in an interview with Dan Rafael of ESPN.com that Vargas had been negative in testing done six days before his positive test. Foster also noted that “it was a very, very low amount” of clenbuterol in Vargas and that there have been numerous reports about athletes in Mexico testing positive.

Salido, for his part, hasn’t objected to the fight going forward.

This isn’t the first time a boxer has tested positive for clenbuterol and that a fight has gone forward anyway. Erik Morales came up positive for the substance prior to his 2012 rematch with Danny Garcia in testing done by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA. The New York State Athletic Commission claims it didn’t know about the test until it was too late to have enough time to weigh the evidence, and so it allowed the fight to go on, according to a report last year by Thomas Hauser.

Morales, too, claimed tainted meat was the culprit. USADA nevertheless issued him a two-year suspension, a toothless punishment given that USADA does not regulate pro boxing and that athletic commissions would be under no obligation to respect the sentence. Morales never fought again anyway, recognizing that his career was over.

Tainted meat has been an issue for years in Mexico, where farmers use clenbuterol in their feed. The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, acknowledged the situation in 2011 when it decided to drop its appeal regarding the lack of punishment of five Mexican soccer players who had tested positive for clenbuterol.

The Associated Press noted last week that the issue remains: “Mexican authorities inspected 200 slaughterhouses in 2015 and found clenbuterol in livestock at 58 of them.”

Nevertheless, it’s a banned substance. WADA has kept clenbuterol on its list of prohibited substances and has not set a threshold at which clenbuterol is allowable.

“It is possible that under certain circumstance the presence of a low level of clenbuterol in an athlete sample can be the result of food contamination,” WADA’s website says. “However, each case is different and all elements need to be taken into account, along with the context of the case.”

Researchers are looking into how to tell when a positive test for clenbuterol is from intentional consumption for the sake of enhancing one’s performance and when it comes from eating contaminated meat, according to a study abstract on the WADA website.

Until then, it’s just an athlete’s word and a commission making a decision based on the amount found in the test sample — and perhaps on its own interest.

Even if the dosage level in Vargas suggests contamination — a reasonable doubt for the California commission to consider, all while requiring more testing in the hopes of showing the fighter to be clean — it’s fair to worry that this decision could be a slippery slope.

We’ve heard it all before. That doesn’t mean that all athletes are lying when they come up with an excuse — or perhaps an explanation — for testing positive. It’s unfortunate for an athlete to be punished if a positive test truly isn’t his or her fault. Yet we’ve come to err on the side of caution. In the grand scheme, it’s the responsibility of the athlete to be cautious about what he or she consumes.

It’s both frightening and worrisome to think about an athlete who’s tested positive still being allowed to compete, especially in a sport where the object is to hurt one’s opponent.

But the California commission also has to cover its own tail, especially as decisions could lead to litigation. The findings reported by the Associated Press are concerning: Clenbuterol is prevalent in the meat in Mexico, and Vargas could present evidence that he had been in Mexico and eating potentially tainted meat there.

Drug testing is far from perfect. We’ve heard enough instances of athletes who were punished not because of testing, but because of other evidence tying them to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The fact that Vargas came up negative days before his positive test doesn’t wholly exonerate him. Nor would subsequent negative tests prove his case.

But it will at least provide more of an indication of him being clean leading into the Salido fight. And the hope is that there was never any illicit use before this positive test for the sake of helping Vargas recover quicker from his training, assisting him in preparing even harder than a clean athlete would normally be able to do.

It’s nowhere near an ideal situation. But at least there’s more testing being done for this fight than we tend to get for an overwhelming majority of boxing matches.

Our eyes have long since been opened to the use of performance-enhancing drugs in seemingly every sport and at seemingly every level. But in boxing, the promoters and commissions still tend to prefer to see no evil. There’s still too little interest in a clean sport, which is no surprise in what remains a dirty business.

“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com