By Jim Dower: The February 11th rematch between Andre Berto (28-1, 22 KO’s) and Victor Ortiz (29-3-2, 22 KO’s) will have Olympic style random drug testing for performance enhancing drugs. This no doubt is something that Berto wanted because he had questions about Ortiz shortly after his win over Berto last April. But now with testing taking place for this fight there shouldn’t be any complaints from Berto or Ortiz.

The last time they fought Ortiz wore Berto down, knocking him down twice en route to winning a 12 round unanimous decision. Berto looked completely spent by the 2nd half of the fight and stayed with his back against the ropes much of the time. Berto did knock Ortiz down twice in the fight, but he had nothing left after dropping Ortiz for the second time in the fight in round six.

Not long after the fight, Berto hired a nutritionist to work on his diet. Berto supposedly had an iron deficiency and that’s why he ran out of gas so quickly. However, Berto looked to be gassing early in his last fight against IBF welterweight champion Jan Zaveck and looked spent by the time the fight was halted in the 5th round due to Zaveck being unable to see out of his right eye.

It looked as if Zaveck was coming on at the time of the stoppage.
Berto will have problems with Ortiz if he can’t fight hard for a full 12 rounds. Ortiz knows how to beat Berto and will likely take the fight to him on the inside and force him to work harder than he wants to.

Ortiz is coming off of a strange 4th round KO loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. last September where Ortiz dropped his hands to apologize to Mayweather for headbutting him and ended up getting knocked out when Mayweather decided to continue fighting.