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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
The UFC is currently speaking with, and taking bids from, several third party organizations to set up independent year round random drug testing for their entire roster of fighters.
That's according to a report from ESPN.com featuring an interview with Marc Ratner, the UFC's Vice President of Regulatory Affairs.
"We are meeting with different companies right now and we're going to have out-of-competition testing," Ratner said. "We're not sure when it's going to start, but we're working on it right now.
"Unannounced blood and urine is going to happen, hopefully in the next three or four months. When you're talking about 500 fighters, there are a lot of logistics. Having fighters in foreign countries makes it tougher, but we're coming up with a plan and [agencies] are making proposals to us in the next two weeks."
While the UFC will be implementing new testing in the future, they plan to continue working with commissions as well, and don't want to impugn on their authority.
Penick's Analysis: The other step in this process is finding out how punishments will be doled out and how transparent the process will be. For fans and fighters, we need to know when tests are being done and what those results wind up being, but this is still a really good advancement for the UFC to be making. If it gets put in place by next year, perhaps we see GSP return to the cage afterall.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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