Mir blames tainted meat, flawed testing for positive sample
Frank Mir knows he's fighting a losing battle against the USADA, but he hasn't given up on searching for an explanation for his positive test last April.
The former UFC heavyweight champion explained on a recent episode of his Phone Booth Fighting podcast that the "B" sample also came back positive as expected, which only made him more determined to figure out what went wrong.
Mir suggested that the steroid turinabol may have entered his system when he ingested kangaroo meat during a trip to Australia for his last fight, questioning how the country regulates its food industry.
"Giving the animals (drugs) is not really unheard of, especially that - turinabol is extremely popular in Australia," Mir said, according to MMA Fighting. "So to give it to the animals to bulk them up, that way you make more money when it comes to bring that animal in to be butchered. It sounds awful, but I'm listening to it, trying to go back, trying to figure that out."
As the only fighter on March's UFC Fight Night 85 card to have failed his drug test, Mir knows he's fighting an uphill battle to prove his innocence. He lacks the resources and connections to dig deeper into the tainted-meat theory.
He also questioned whether it was in the lab's best interest to make sure the "B" sample confirmed their earlier test, since a false positive could reflect poorly on the testers.
"Here's my thought on that: you and I work for a lab, you do a test on a guy and let's say you messed up, that somehow it came back the wrong test," Mir said. "Now I'm your co-worker and I'm going to run the test on the same thing. It came out of our lab, we work for the same company - this lab - even if I found that you made an error, am I really going to go ahead and go, ‘oh man, hey, you know that guy you just got suspended for two years and might have ended his career? You screwed up. Our whole lab messed up. Oh my God, yeah, let's go ahead and let's bring that to light real quick.'
"I would think having a test at the same lab is a conflict of interest."