JRE MMA Show #53 with Jeff Novitzky

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Four, three, two, one.

Boom, got a little thing going on here now, a little circle. Hello, Jeff, Merry Christmas.

Jeff Novitzky (0:13)

What's up, Joe, you too.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

How you livin?

Jeff Novitzky (0:15)

Not been the easiest week in my life or my careers last week, but hangin in there.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

To make this standalone, so that people don't have to go figuring this out on their own, and I'm sure many, many fans that are tuning in already know the gist of the details, let's lay this out from the beginning. John Jones' initial failed test.

Jeff Novitzky (0:36)

Yeah, so that was July of 2017 He tested positive for approximately 20, anywhere from 20 to 60 picograms of a long-term metabolite known as the M3 metabolite of a substance called dihydrochloromethyltestosterone, DHCMT, also known as oral tarrinabol.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

And this was over a year ago. What was determined to be the source of this stuff?

Jeff Novitzky (1:04)

Never determined what the source was. So John went through a full arbitration hearing, was never able to determine where it came from, tested all the supplements he was using, went through many interviews with USADA, had a full-on arbitration hearing.

The source was never determined where it came from.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Why was his suspension so low or so short if it wasn't determined?

Jeff Novitzky (1:29)

So, I mean, there's many factors that go into what that suspension was. I would argue in the totality of the evidence that was presented in that arbitration that it wasn't a short suspension because really one key thing came out of arbitration. So John went to arbitration before an individual by the name of Richard McLaren.

Richard McLaren has an arbitration group up in Canada and McLaren is probably worldwide known as one of the most credible guys in anti-doping. I know you had the Icarus producer, director on. The McLaren report was the report that came from all that. He basically investigated the Russian state being involved in doping and Sochi games and put out actually a series of reports on it, detailing that up to 1,000 Russian athletes were breaking the rules and the Russian laboratory was helping them get around it. So he's a very, very respected guy. He's independent of obviously the UFC. He's independent of USADA.

He acts on his own.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

And his determination was?

Jeff Novitzky (2:34)

His determination, and I'll read you kind of what he said. He said, I find that all evidence available to me leads me to conclude that the violation was not intended nor could it have enhanced the athlete's performance.

So A, non-intentional. So non-intentional ingestion. I mean, there's no argument that it was in his system, but he found the evidence to show non-intentional use. And then he went further saying that based on the numbers of what he saw in the evidence, there was not even a performance enhancing benefit afforded to John for having this long-term metabolite in his system. And I think that's significant. When you talk about, hey, 15 months, that's kind of light being that this is a second time through. I would argue that if there was an argument that maybe it's on the higher end, and certainly, we'll talk about the California Commission, Andy Foster took that position in John's recent California hearing. He was a little bit critical of USADA.

He thought, he's intimately familiar with his evidence, both in the previous case and this occurrence, and he also saw that there was no evidence that an independent arbitrator made this statement and decision of John intentionally cheating. So if anything, I'd say that potentially there could be an argument that it was on the higher end versus the lower end.

Joe Rogan (3:55)

Because of the fact that it was an unintentional ingestion.

Jeff Novitzky (3:58)

Exactly.

Joe Rogan (3:59)

Now, what is John's excuse? What has John said, how he got this into his system?

Jeff Novitzky (4:04)

Yeah, well look, it's detailed in the arbitration hearing at all. John fully admits that some of the lifestyle decisions he was making, you know, the partying and things, you know, probably did not lead to making smart decisions and making smart choices in terms of what was being ingested in the body.

But certainly his testimony was under oath that I have never intentionally cheated and did not intentionally put this substance in my body. And not only this case, but as we talk about the subsequent case here, I think you'll see that based on the numbers, you know, coming out of his tests and based on some studies that have been done on some of these substances, it would tend to support that.