Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but if your Jon Jones, that fire might have been mistaken for a small crack of a match, and not a full blown forest fire.
Today, in a new interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, the UFC’s head of USADA Jeff Novitzky publicly confirmed that he believes Jon Jones is innocent in his pending drug testing case.
This is an actual public statement from the man in charge of the UFC drug testing program, and he is now in belief that Jon Jones is innocent.
Here’s what Jeff Novitzky said on the JRE:
“Generally, we don’t talk about a case. So, how the process works when an athlete tests positive, USADA will notify me,” as transcribed by MMAImports.com. “I will usually pick up the phone right away and call Dana and let him know, and the UFC puts out an announcement…
“If the athlete chooses to talk about scenarios of what happened, they’re free to do that. At that point USADA and the UFC can talk about it. So, there’s been some things said in the Jon case, by Jon.
“Particularly, he had two clean tests on July 7 and July 8, before his positive test on July 30, which I believe was weigh in day… This was a substance used by East Germans regularly in the late 60’s, and then came into the fold a little more recently out of Russia…
“Right upfront, I’ve said this for awhile now, it would not make sense for a UFC athlete, especially a champion contender like Jon Jones, that knew, ‘I’m tested quit regularly in this program’. It would not make a lot of sense that that would be your drug of choice, if you were intentionally trying to cheat.
“I think it’s come out after the fact that USADA did another test on Jon a couple months after his positive test, and he was negative. So that would be indicative that the prohibited substance entered his system sometime after July 7 or 8, and it was likely a pretty small amount and it cleared his system pretty quickly.
“Who knows where it plays out, but certainly on the surface of things, especially with this kind of information out there, it wouldn’t indicate intentional use. Now, that could be wrong, and I don’t know that definitively, but we’ll see how this plays out.”
Here’s his full statement and line of questioning from Joe Rogan:
Who owes Jon Jones an apology?
