MARQUARDT
- Two voluntary retests are negative!
8-19-2005
Denver/Broomfield/Boulder, CO
Nevada State Athletic Commission apologizes
for releasing
WRONG report to press
Keith Kizer, the Chief Deputy Attorney General for the state of Nevada, has informed MMAWeekly that the Nevada State Athletic Commission received erroneous information about Nathan Marquardt's steroid re-test, and in fact Marquardt's re-test came up negative for nandrolone metabolite and all other anabolic steroids.
In an interview with MMAWeekly, Kizer clarified the situation. Kizer said,
"Zuffa called the lab to get the results, and instead of getting the results of the re-test, they actually got the results of the original drug test, which of course was positive. So Zuffa tells us that, you know, the re-test has come in and it's positive, and then we pass that on to the media. So then today, about the time of the weigh-ins [for UFC 54], the commission's secretary calls me, because she had also been told that the re-test was positive, and she says, 'I just got the actual hard copy of the test results from the lab, and it says negative.'"
Kizer went on to say that the Nevada State Athletic Commission then cleared up the confusion with
Zuffa. Kizer said, "So I went to talk about it with Marc [Ratner, who is the executive director of the
NSAC], and talked about it with some people from Zuffa, and we found out where the confusion was. Zuffa thought that the 'positive' test result they were given by the lab was for the re-test, but it was actually for the original test. And the re-test came back negative. So we obviously apologized to Mr. Marquardt, but we were told that the re-test was positive. I'm sure some people are going to think there's a conspiracy or something, but we were originally told that the re-test was positive. We now know, straight from the lab, that the re-test was negative."
