Since the fight was on July 9th they could have gotten the results ahead of the fight.
To me it's somewhat foolish to do any testing before an event if you won't have the results until after that event, especially when it's a competition that involves concussions and physical harm.
I expect fighters that are trying to game the system to fail fight night tests and there's no way to stop that. At the same time, if the results of the test from the 28th had been processed in a timely fashion then the fight should have been cancelled and this lawsuit wouldn't be taking place.
28th June collection to 9th July is pushing it a little bit.
bear in mind. Sample was presumably collected in Canada by CCES (Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport). Now, it seems those samples were shipped to SMRTL in Utah so you could be looking at 30th before they arrive, maybe even the 1st July.
Thats a pretty bedlam time for the US based labs. Theyve just had the cycling national championships, theres various athletics events going on. It was also an Olympic Year so youve got much increased testing of all the Olympic athletes. Add to this the Rio lab had lost its accreditation prior to the Olympics and samples were being shipped from Rio to the two US labs, its fair to say both SMRTL and UCLA would have had a much higher than usual amount of samples to get through.
So its entirely feasible that the sample wouldnt even get opened for analysis until the 6th or 7th of July in a best-case scenario.
Then you get into the testing methodology. This isnt like a lab the commissions use. Some tests that SMRTL run can literally take days to complete. Then, once you get a positive test you then do a confirmation analysis so retest everything again (dont get this confused with a and b samples. the a sample is actually split in the lab. they run the tests with the first half so in teh event of a positive they then double check with the second half). So even if the sample got opened on the 7th, you still could be looking at the 10th-12th before a positive was confirmed.
Then USADA get informed by the lab and the lab will send over hard copies of the test package. USADA need to look those over, make sure everything is in order, dot i's, cross t's, before officially informing the athlete.
for what its worth, the average time between collection of the sample, and announcement of the potential violation is 23.75 days
The timeline on Brock was 18 days, so in real terms it was considerably quicker than average.
So far, twenty violations have been announced quicker than Brocks (but three of those were based on admissions so no waiting for the sample to be analysed) and thirty-six violations took longer to get announced, so his sample timewise is amongst the faster to be handled.
heres everything, sorted by number of days between sample collection and announcement
is it ideal? no. Would be great if samples could be turned round before the fight happened but where do you draw the line. ten days out? a week out? two days out? there will always be a cut off point.
