

Former federal agent Jeff Novitzky left the public sector to work for the UFC last year. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

The man at the front of the room is still trying to save sports. Standing behind a lectern, he is as striking as ever: 6 feet 7, trim, neat and still as straight as an arrow. Jeff Novitzky reminded the 40 or so people in attendance that he’d been in this Rayburn House Office Building twice before — for an infamous congressional hearing that featured both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and another that starred Roger Clemens.

“I guess it’s fitting the topic of conversation today is PEDs, right?” Novitzky said. “What else would it be?”

Novitzky made his reputation as the nation’s so-called top steroid cop by shooting big stars out of the sky. He has ruined the legacies of athletes such as Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones. Depending on one’s point of view, Novitzky either sniffed out cheats and helped change the culture of sports in America or he used vast government resources to chase pelts and personal trophies.

Fourteen years after leading an investigation of the Bay Area Laboratories Co-Operative (BALCO) that ensnared Bonds and Jones, Novitzky has switched teams, going from government agencies to the private sector. As the “president of health and performance” for the mixed martial arts promotional entity Ultimate Fighting Championship, Novitzky has installed an anti-doping program that he thinks tops anything else in professional sports, and he returned to Capitol Hill recently to explain why to the Dietary Supplement Caucus.

“We’re putting this program out there as a gold standard,” Novitzky, 48, told the room, “so that Major League Baseball, so that the NFL sees, ‘Hey, here’s what a real solid, comprehensive, robust program looks like.’ And we’re hoping in years to come that they follow suit.”

The alliance with the UFC was an intriguing one. Mixed martial arts built its name on brazenly eschewing rules and had come under fire for what was perceived as lax testing that could lead to rampant drug use. Hiring Novitzky one year ago raised eyebrows — either smart marketing that might temporarily quiet critics or a thunderbolt intended to immediately change the culture of the entire sport.

“I have to say, I was very surprised by the move to hire Novitzky,” said Victor Conte, the BALCO mastermind who was imprisoned because of Novitzky’s detective work. Conte is now an advocate for clean sport and keeps a close eye on anti-doping efforts. “At first, I had questions about it. I questioned his motives. But you know, I think this is just really an extension of what he was doing before. He wants to rid the sport of doping.

“It’s a massive task, and I appreciate the effort. Do I think they’ll completely clean it up and we’ll have drug-free MMA? Probably not. But I think they will significantly reduce the use of performance-enhancing drugs.”

Aiming at big targets

Novitzky’s athletic career peaked in college as a basketball player at San Jose State, where his studies focused on accounting. He found the actuary tables and spreadsheets lacking in excitement, though, and it wasn’t until a job fair that his future became clear.

“The IRS came on campus and their recruitment pitch was, ‘Be an accountant with a gun,’ ” Novitzky recalled. “I was like, ‘There you go; that sounds interesting.’ ”

He became an agent with the IRS’s criminal investigations division, his work focused largely on the drug world and its loose accounting system. His career changed when he came across a San Francisco Bay area company that was supplying many of the nation’s top athletes with nutritional supplements and cutting-edge drugs. Baseball stars such as Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic medalists such as Jones and Tim Montgomery were clients.

Novitzky was the face of the investigation, the one who was digging through trash and medical waste and accompanying athletes as they testified before a grand jury.

His targets weren’t the athletes, he said, but the distributors at the top of the food chain. While Conte served four months in prison and his chemist, Patrick Arnold, served three months, the headlines focused on the athletes, who received immunity for their cooperation. While Jones, a five-time Olympic medalist, served six months for lying to a grand jury, Bonds never served any time, his conviction for obstruction eventually overturned on appeal. Their reputations were tarnished, and most never recovered.

“Not withstanding some short sentences, I’m very proud of what we did,” Novitzky said recently. “I mean, our national pastime went from zero drug testing to now, of the major professional sports, the strongest. It changed the nature and the face of the game.”

Novitzky helped with baseball’s Mitchell Report in 2007 and the next year moved on to the Food and Drug Administration, where he did much of the same work. The big target this time was Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner who was adamant he competed cleanly. The U.S. Attorney’s office ultimately decided against filing charges, but Armstrong was forced to confess, eventually banned from competition and abandoned by his sponsors.

Sports had to refine their policies and take steroids seriously, but public sentiment shifted. President Bush railed against steroid cheats in his 2004 State of the Union address, but a decade later, Novitzky was suddenly feeling resistance.

“I mean, they couldn’t number these cases fast enough,” he said. “The phone was ringing off the hook. . . . I saw almost a 180 by the end of my career. We were getting pressure not to work them.”

The top FDA boss, Margaret Hamburg, saw the skepticism turn to criticism in a 2011 hearing on the Hill.

“When you’re talking over and over again about limited resources and serious drug abuses and issues, is that what we need to spend our money on? A guy using some kind of enhancement drug?” Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) said, according to published reports.

“It almost appears to me that there’s a little adventurism going on here; that Mr. Novitzky is operating on his own.”



Lorenzo Fertitta, center, with Dana White, left, and Matt O'Toole, knew the UFC needed more stringent drug testing to move into the mainstream. (Brad Barket/Getty Images For Reebok)

Rules of engagement

The UFC was established 23 years ago on the premise that anything goes. The slogan in those early days was “There are no rules!” but as MMA inched its way toward the mainstream, its meager rule book grew. Brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta were casino magnates who bought the UFC in 2001 and hadn’t given much thought to PEDs.

“Anti-doping in the early days was really kind of an IQ test: Could you figure out what to take and when to take it so you wouldn’t be dirty?” said Forrest Griffin, a retired fighter who still works with the UFC on performance initiatives and consulted with Novitzky.

Drug testing varied from state to state. Many fighters were subject to testing only on the night of a fight. Griffin said he was always clean, but it was impossible to know about the rest of the field.

“I would always wonder, ‘Well, I live in Nevada, so I get tested, but the guy I’m fighting lives in California or Brazil. Is he getting tested?’ ” he said.

The Fertittas have worked to push the UFC toward the mainstream, lobbying state legislatures and wooing big-name advertisers. Drug testing was an important step in legitimizing the product for both competitors and fans.

They brought in Novitzky for a casual conversation about how the UFC might want to address doping. It wasn’t intended as a job interview. “But right when he left the meeting, I was like, ‘We gotta hire this guy,’ ” Lorenzo said.

Novitzky had a decision to make. He was 21 / 2 years away from retiring from the federal government, and he had to decide whether the UFC was serious about cleaning up its ranks or whether the organization simply wanted a nice press release.

“The more I thought about it, I kept thinking they wouldn’t have offered to me if they weren’t serious,” Novitzky said. “They had to have known — with my experience, my past, my reputation — if they weren’t serious, why in the hell would they want me coming in here?”

Benefits, and costs

The UFC’s instructions were simple: It wanted the best drug policy in sports, and it wanted it as soon as possible. Novitzky was brought on board last April. Six weeks later, the policy was announced, and on July 1 of last year, it was rolled out.

Just as quickly, Novitzky had to embrace a new way of thinking. His career was no longer solely focused on the bust. If a fighter is dirty, Novitzky blames himself for failing to educate and explain. The man who made his name digging through trash was suddenly jet-setting around the world, explaining the UFC’s new drug policy to every fighter on every UFC card. In those first few months, he was in Tokyo, London, Ireland, Brazil twice, Canada twice and all over the United States. He visited gyms and led informational sessions for fighters in Las Vegas.

Drug testing, he hopes, gives fighters confidence their opponents are clean, lowering the compulsion to cheat themselves. So Novitzky explains to them why he believes the UFC’s policy is the best in the country. It’s random, and fighters are subject to testing at any hour and on any day. The penalties are stiff (two-year suspension for a first offense). Fighters have no offseason when they’re not subject to testing. It follows the World Anti-Doping Agency Code and utilizes “biological passports” that track severe changes in body chemistry. And it’s administered by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, an independent third-party company that removes the UFC and its officials from the equation entirely.

“The only thing we get is the bill to pay for it and the results if it comes back positive,” Lorenzo Fertitta said.

The UFC aims to test all 500 or so athletes it has under contract multiple times each. The goal is more than 2,800 tests in a calendar year. Fertitta said the undertaking costs the UFC “in the millions.”

According to the USADA’s most recent numbers, in the first 41 / 2 months of this year, the organization has tested 344 athletes a total of 594 times, including one fighter 11 times (Anderson Silva) and a handful of others five or six times (Holly Holm, Miesha Tate, Vitor Belfort, Conor McGregor).

Since the policy was enacted, three cases have been adjudicated (two resulted in two-year bans) and at least nine other positive tests remain under review. Last month, the UFC was less than a week away from a big event — UFC on Fox 19 — when the USADA notified Novitzky that one of the co-headliners, Lyoto Machida, had a dirty test. Novitzky called Lorenzo Fertitta to share the news.

“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” Fertitta recalled. “ ‘How is this even possible? What are we supposed to do?’ . . . He said we had no choice: He gets pulled off the card, and we gotta make the best of it. We knew from the start this was the potential and that things like this could happen.”



Jeff Novitzky says he now sees a positive drug test by a UFC fighter as a failure to explain the policies adequately. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

‘It’s difficult to gauge’

But is it the gold standard? Most drug testing in American pro sports takes place at the team facility, not unannounced at an athlete’s home or gym. Offseason testing is light, if existent at all. Players’ unions, which the UFC does not have, prevent leagues from unilaterally implementing doping rules.

UFC officials said they’re pleased with the early drug-testing results and said anecdotal evidence suggests that the organization has turned a corner. But they’re hesitant to lean too heavily on the numbers and test results.

“It’s difficult to gauge,” Novitzky said of the drug policy’s success, “because you don’t know if you’re catching everybody or there’s nobody to catch.”

The closest comparison is the testing Olympic athletes are subjected to, which also is administered by USADA. Conte points out that it wasn’t long ago that many of his athletes — track stars such as Jones and Montgomery — took those same tests while using PEDs and never tested positive.

“Do I think it’s the best in the world, as they say? I don’t know about that,” Conte said of the UFC policy. “[Former MLB commissioner] Bud Selig used to say, ‘This is the toughest testing in American sports!’ I’d laugh every time I heard that. So I’m not a fan of those types of claims.

“The testing in place now with the UFC is similar to the testing in the BALCO days where I was tap dancing on the forehead of USADA. So to act like we’re going to chase you to the end of the earth and we’ll catch you is nonsense.”

Conte said he thinks the program will curb the use of PEDs in the UFC, but as long as there’s more money and more sponsors to be had, some athletes will find a way to stay a step ahead of the tests.

Novitzky knows this. He has interviewed more drug cheats than perhaps anyone in the world. But he wants MMA fighters to realize the rewards are not worth the risks. He concluded his caucus speech the same way he closes his presentation to athletes: by sharing the stories of athletes he interviewed whose drug use cost them medals, money and reputation. That’s not what he wants for UFC fighters.

“There’s this perception that I’m this cowboy with heads and pelts on my wall, trying to bring down big-name athletes: ‘Here comes Jeff, the drug cop,’ ” Novitzky said. “I think I’m changing that. That’s not my job. I equate this with being a parent to 500-plus kids. If they’re causing trouble, we’ll catch them. But my job is to keep them out of trouble in the first place.”