Frank Mir Suspended Two Years For USADA Violation
Legendary former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir may unfortunately end his career suspended.
The 37-year-old submission expert was suspended for two years by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) according to a press release from the UFC, for his use of banned substance dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (DHCMT) in conjunction with his knockout loss to Mark Hunt in March 2016.
The press release went into detail about an out-of-competition test sample that was previously labeled negative actually being positive. The UFC described the sequence of events and Mir’s suspension overall on their USADA website:
USADA announced today that UFC® athlete, Francisco (Frank) Mir, of Las Vegas, Nev., received a two-year sanction after multiple positive tests for a prohibited substance.
Mir, 38, tested positive for a long-term metabolite of dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (DHCMT), following an in-competition test conducted on March 20, 2016, at UFC Fight Night 85 in Brisbane, Australia. DHCMT is a non-Specified Substance in the class of Anabolic Agents and prohibited at all times under the UFC Anti-Doping Policy, which has adopted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List. The finding of a long-term DHCMT metabolite in Mir’s sample, which was identified through a new detection method by the WADA-accredited laboratory in Tokyo, Japan, led to Mir being provisionally suspended from competition on April 8, 2016.
Upon learning of the positive results of the sample analyzed in Tokyo, USADA had all previously collected stored samples for Mir reanalyzed at the WADA-accredited laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah (SMRTL), which had also recently implemented methodology for the detection of newly identified long-term DHCMT metabolites. As a result of the additional analyses, SMRTL discovered that an out-of-competition sample Mir provided on February 5, 2016, which had previously been reported to USADA as negative for the presence of prohibited substances, was also positive for the same long-term DHCMT metabolite found in Mir’s in-competition sample.
If the retroactive suspension is indeed the end for Mir, he’ll go down as one of the greatest heavyweights in UFC history, owning several elite records such as most wins, fights, and finishes in UFC heavyweight history. He owns the UFC record for most first-round finishes with 10 also.
But if there was any division Mir could potentially make a comeback in it’s heavyweight, as the UFC’s largest weight class is also its oldest, with many of the top competitors fighting into their late 30s and beyond. Still, Mir has absorbed 8 knockout losses and this blemish on his record doesn’t help, but should he return for one more bout in the octagon he’s made so much history in?
