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Frank Mir this past week was revealed as the latest fighter approved by the Nevada State Athletic Commission for a therapeutic use exemption for testosterone.
Mir, 33, claimed he started using the therapy in January, and informed the commission on 3/27. That was the day of the surprise test of six heavyweights at a UFC press conference that led to Alistair Overeem failing a test and being pulled out of his main event heavyweight title fight with Junior Dos Santos. Mir, who didn’t fail his test, ironically, got the spot, but lost via second round stoppage.
The Mir situation is the most perplexing to date. Mir’s massive weight gain in 2009 after his loss to Brock Lesnar (he gained 40 pounds in a short period of time, not all of that was muscle, but a lot of it was in going on a powerlifting and strength regime after feeling it was not having the power to deal with Lesnar that led to his loss) would seem to belie any idea that he was suffering from low testosterone. Gaining appreciable muscle by a mature hard training athlete would seem to be nearly impossible from someone suffering from low testosterone, and not be all that easy for a mature athlete in such a cardio-based sport without performance enhancing drugs to begin with. In the case of Mir, he never failed a steroid test.
Unlike Shane Roller, Dan Henderson and Chael Sonnen, who are three of the other four athletes approved for TRT in Nevada in the history of MMA in the state, Mir has not been cutting weight for two or more decades. The other three, since childhood, were high level youth wrestlers, who went up the ladder staying in the sport through high school, college, international and then MMA competition. Mir has competed as a heavyweight his entire career and was even a heavyweight in his high school wrestling days.
But he took numerous tests during the period applying and must have shown low natural testosterone, and when supplemented, his level fell into normal range. Kizer noted that even though a testosterone/epitestosterone urine test may not be relevant for someone on a TUE, that Mir came up normal in both blood and urine tests taken 5/26 and 5/27. Mir also took a handful of serum testosterone blood tests leading into the fight. Mir was bigger, at 261 pounds, than he had fought at in most of his fights, but he had cut to make 265 against Cheick Kongo in 2009. Whatever help the therapy provided, he was too slow to compete with Dos Santos.
Even though testosterone supplementation has gotten a lot of news this year with the issues with Sonnen and Quinton Jackson (who was approved for use by the UFC for his losing fight with Ryan Bader in February in a UFC-regulated show in Japan), Kizer noted that the expected floodgates have not opened.
Kizer noted that Mir and Sonnen have been the only athletes approved for TUE’s this year. Several others have been turned down in recent years for a variety of reasons, including in different cases, fighters whose testosterone levels may have been low, but were not abnormally low, a fighter who used the therapy and his testosterone levels while on therapy were well above maximum, and in at least one case, an athlete whose doctors did not cooperate or come across as credible. The idea is the supplemented level of testosterone is supposed to take you from dangerously low levels to normal levels, and not low levels to above average or to the top limit allowable.
Sonnen’s approval was conditional upon passing all his tests leading into and out of the 7/7 fight with Anderson Silva. He said that nobody else had applied. Kizer still maintains that nobody will get approval for a TUE if they have damaged their own production due to usage of steroids, but it’s currently impossible to determine what is the cause of low testosterone and why it seems so prevalent with MMA fighters. Sonnen claimed under oath that he had never taken steroids other than the testosterone in conjunction with his TUE dating back to 2008.
Dr. Timothy Trainor, the sports medicine doctor the Nevada commission used in the Sonnen case, is attempting to do research with endocrinologists to determine if years of weight cutting and/or head blows leads to do low testosterone production. Both have been theorized, the former for years, but nothing has been proven. Still, NFL players take blows to the head and get repeated concussions, and the NFL has allowed less than ten testosterone TUE’s in the last 22 seasons.
But Kizer does expect the number of requests to increase based on things that happened this year, notably that more fighters are aware of the procedure and he expects more will have their levels tested.
But the issue of fighters needing it has become even more complex. The idea of needing testosterone supplementation is because you have endocrine damage that doesn’t allow you to naturally produce the hormone. However, Roller, Nate Marquardt and Sean McCorkle have all publicly admitted usage, and have stopped using because of the hassle of dealing with commission requirements. Roller and Marquardt stated it was simply too much of a hassle to comply with what the commission needed. Roller said that he didn’t feel any different on it. Marquardt, who got fired because he abused the therapy and was not allowed to fight in a television main event, was insistent he needed it when the walls came crashing down. But now he’s fighting Tyron Woodley on 7/14 and not using. McCorkle claimed in a message board post some time back that he stopped using when he came to UFC.
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_________________ Drop In wrote: I'm picturing a 12 year old Bob Loblaw bitching out a Randy Savage Wrestling Buddy for botching his finisher. Also envisioning Bob Loblaw getting bitched at for lighting the living room table on fire for said finisher.
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