I don’t know about you, but part of me thinks that Conor Benn wasn’t trying to get pregnant when he failed his most recent drug test. Given that men account for roughly 0% of pregnancies, the fertility drug found in the British boxer’s system may not have helped him conceive.
To make matters worse, that failed doping test ruled him out of his super-fight against Chris Eubank Jr in early October. But what if you were one of those desperately unlucky boxers? What if those pesky testers found a fertility drug, steroids or human growth hormone in your system for reasons other than athletic enhancement? Don’t worry, your fellow fighters have come up with a smörgåsbord of barmy excuses to explain your troubles away.
blame the food
A useful place to start is with tainted meat, or even a nefarious cup of tea. Just a few months ago, Mexican featherweight Óscar Valdez told ESPN that the switch from coffee to herbal tea was responsible for the phentermine found in his positive drugs test. The fact that the drug also happens to be useful in cutting weight was, obviously, a coincidence.
On the food front, plenty of Mexican and US fighters have had the luxury of falling back on the old tainted beef excuse whenever clenbuterol – a substance used to build lean muscle mass – is detected in their samples. Sadly, the clenbuterol-fed cows option isn’t available to UK-based fighters, but it seems dodgy meat is everywhere.
Why not emulate the ‘I ate uncastrated wild boar’ explanation given by Tyson Fury and his cousin Hughie back in 2015? Let’s face it, which of us hasn’t received a dish of uncastrated boar offal at a restaurant, after we specifically asked for castrated? In fairness to the pair, they wisely hedged their bets on that one, suggesting that the nandrolone could also have come from uncastrated pig offal – or, alternately, the equally plausible ‘contaminated supplement’.
blame your family
The contaminated supplement excuse can make the boxer appear more gormless than guilty. Indeed, the past is paved with absurdly-named products that athletes have blamed for positive tests. Step forward Superpharm, Dynamita Recovery and Ripped Fuel. You’d think a boxer might avoid a product called Ripped Fuel, but some of us are just trusting.
Sometimes too trusting. Take the case of British featherweight Abdul-Bari Awad, also known as Kid Galahad. He was innocently going about his life when the anabolic steroid stanozolol wormed its way into his testing sample. But how did it get there? According to the boxer, his brother spiked one of his supplements after the pair fell out ‘for which the brother has now proved an admission’.
But what if you don’t have a sibling or coach to blame? No problem. Just dust off a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory.
