In late December 2016, UFC heavyweight Josh Barnett was informed that he’d been flagged for a potential violation of the company’s anti-doping policy after a sample he’d submitted earlier that month revealed the presence of ostarine, a banned substance.

Approximately 15 months later, an arbitrator found that Barnett bore “the extreme low end” of fault for this violation, for which he’d already suffered a “de facto punishment” in the form of this long period of ineligibility. Therefore, according to chief arbitrator Richard McLaren, Barnett deserved only a “reprimand” for his use of a tainted supplement.

Whether or not it sounds like it, that’s a groundbreaking victory with potentially far-reaching implications in the UFC. And all it cost Barnett was the time and money it took to see this thing all the way through to the end.

In a lot of ways, Barnett’s case was not unique. Like several other UFC fighters, he blamed his positive test on a contaminated supplement. Unlike many others, Barnett went to great lengths to both investigate and document the supplements he was using before he popped positive, so much so that McLaren described him as a “very meticulous and careful person” whose testimony was particularly impressive and convincing.

“In my experience as an arbitrator of hundreds of cases of doping cases, I have never heard testimony from an individual who has taken so much care to record his supplement regime in order to avoid the very problem he is now experiencing,” McLaren wrote.

Barnett did his due diligence in investigating the substance he was taking, a supposed testosterone-booster called Tributestin, which purported to contain only tribulus terrestris, which is not a banned substance. He also kept detailed records and preserved a sample of every supplement he took, just in case he needed to provide it as evidence later on.

He did, in the arbitrator’s view, just about everything he could reasonably be expected to do in order to prevent an anti-doping policy violation. And still USADA wanted to give him a lengthy suspension, in part because of his history of positive drug tests.

But McLaren declined to count Barnett’s 2009 test in California against him here, on the grounds it did not meet the standards set out by the current USADA policy. That left this one to consider on its own merits, which included a minimum degree of fault for the “meticulous” heavyweight.

The result is something of a blueprint for other UFC fighters. Want to take supplements, but fear contamination? Then be as careful about it as Barnett was, and take every step along the way to prove it just in case you need to defend yourself some day.

But more important is the lengths Barnett was willing to go to in order to make his case. Similar instances in the past have ended with fighters accepting short suspensions from USADA, even when both parties agreed that a contaminated supplement was the cause of the positive test – not a willful attempt to cheat.

And, looking at Barnett’s case, you can see why the fighters opted to go that route. It’s easier to accept some blame (even if you don’t think you deserve it), along with a short suspension than it is to see it through to arbitration.

But the outcome of Barnett’s case suggests that, just maybe, arbitrators aren’t as eager to count these inadvertent failures against the fighters, especially when they have to give up months or even years of their career just to get a ruling.

Time is the big issue for Barnett. He’s a 40-year-old pro fighter. Even at heavyweight, where careers have a way of stretching on and on, the clock is likely running out on him.

(Interesting side note: The arbitrator’s report suggests that Barnett might have been ready to step away from fighting anyway, at least for a time. According to the timeline of events, he was tested by USADA on Dec. 9, 2016. A few days later, on Dec. 14, Barnett sent USADA and the UFC a written notice that he intended to take “a leave of absence” from fighting in order to focus on other aspects of his career. Barnett seems to have been requesting to be at least temporarily removed from the testing pool until he decided he wanted to return to active competition. It wasn’t until Dec. 27 that he was notified of a potential anti-doping violation.)

But what if you’re not at the tail end of a long career when a supplement gets you in hot water with USADA? What if you’re like Tim Means, who was 34, with a potentially long career ahead of him when he also tested positive for a supplement contaminated by ostarine, resulting in a six-month suspension?

Means accepted the punishment and was back in the cage eight months later. Barnett fought to prove his innocence, and it was 15 months before he succeeded.

According to Barnett, the net result is a gain of only three months since USADA had asked him to accept a suspension of a year and a half earlier on in settlement talks.

Was the fight worth it? For the intangible rewards, maybe. Barnett spent a lot of time and money proclaiming his innocence, but in the end he got an arbitrator to rule that he bore only minimal fault, and that he had in fact done an impressive job of trying to avoid this very situation. Whatever people make of his past, which includes at least three other positive drug tests, stretching all the way back to 2001, in this case he proved his innocence.

In the process, he may have exposed some of the flaws in USADA’s approach, while also showing other fighters how to defend themselves against the UFC’s anti-doping bureaucracy.

Then again, he also showed them the cost of such an effort. And not everyone on the roster can afford it.

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