The testosterone-to-epitestosterone (T/E) ratio and total testosterone level of the UFC’s light heavyweight champion are “highly suspicious”, says Victor Conte, a previously convicted steroid trafficker and money launderer, turned chastened crusader against doping in professional sports. Conte founded the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative sports nutrition center and regularly speaks on the topic of performance enhancing drugs.
He told Sherdog Radio that the measured results in three of Jones’ pre-UFC 182 drug tests have been alarmingly low. The normal T/E ratio for an average African-American male is 1.3:1, says Conte. Jones’ samples showed ratios of 0.29:1, 0.35:1 and 0.19:1. Same goes for his overall testosterone levels. The three samples contained 1.8 ng/mL, 0.59 ng/mL and 4.9 ng/mL, the average level is 61.3 ng/ML.
Conte calls a T/E ratio deviation greater than 30 percent a “red flag”, Jones’ ratio deviated around 80 percent.
“That’s extremely low”, says the PED expert. And although none of the three samples contained traces of exogenous testosterone or any other PED, Conte still thinks there is something cooking:
“The question is what was suppressing his testosterone production for that period of time. Something caused it to go down, and I do not believe it was overtraining. Exogenous testosterone and other steroids in a period of time, depending on dosage and method of administration, can completely shut your testosterone and epitestosterone levels in urine to 0…. The levels being low there can be many explanations. [People say], ‘Well maybe it’s because he was taking cocaine.’ There’s no solid science out there that shows cocaine lowers testosterone.”
Since no PEDs have been found in the champion’s system, no one can tell for sure if or if he did not cheat to win in what might have been the biggest fight of his career to date, a world title defense against Olympic wrestler Daniel Cormier, in the main event of UFC 182. That’s why Conte suggests to up the testing frequency and randomly test the champion on a regular basis.
“These (levels) are highly suspicious for Jon Jones, in my opinion. This is the reason that sophisticated anti-doping officials do target testing. So based on what we see here, my opinion is Jon Jones should be on a very short leash and should be random tested here until they sort out why he has these anomalies.”
(Transcription taken from sherdog.com)
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