Original Article: Bad Left Hook
Oct 27, 2018
He is the man maybe most associated with PEDs in America, arguably, apart from the athletes who’ve been ensnared in notoriety for getting busted having used banned supplements.
Victor Conte knows of what he speaks regarding performance enhancing drugs, because he’s concocted them and helped administer them. Today, he’s on the other side of the tracks, and speak sup in favor of clean athletes. Conte is in NYC to watch middleweight Daniel Jacobs, who trained at his SNAC facility in Cali, battle Sergiy Derevyanchenko at the Madison Square Garden Theater tonight (Oct. 27), and on HBO.
So, I asked Conte, how bad is the presence of PEDs in boxing?
“I see that it’s getting better. I tell you what I believe is going to be a game changer,” he told me before the Friday weigh in went down at MSG. Conte said that more eyes are opening to what sort of drugs are being used to get an edge in performance, and more people are waking up to who is doing the stiffest testing. Conte told me that fighter BJ Saunders got tested before he was to fight Demetrius Andrade, and flagged positive.
How that came about: the notorious V.I.C. works with Andrade, and he volunteered to pay for tough testing, through VADA. He went back and forth with promoter Eddie Hearn, who was over-seeing the Andrade-Saunders tango, to unspool Oct. 20 in Boston. Hearn said OK, we will go with VADA testing, and soon after the testing protocol was agreed to, Saunders got smacked down.
