Sanchez: Golovkin would be suspended if he tested positive for clenbuterol

By Boxing News - 03/13/2018 - Comments

Image: Sanchez: Golovkin would be suspended if he tested positive for clenbuterol

By Sean Jones: Abel Sanchez says he thinks Saul Canelo Alvarez’s excuse of having tested positive for clenbuterol from eating tainted meat is a “lame” excuse, and he believes that if Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin had tested positive for the same drug, he’d have been suspended right now and there wouldn’t be a rematch on May 5th on HBO PPV.

Sanchez states that Canelo’s promoters at Golden Boy Promotions would make sure that Golovkin would be suspended for the positive test, because they don’t want the Canelo-GGG fight. He thinks the only reason Canelo is fighting Golovkin is because of the pressure from the boxing fans. If not for that, the fight wouldn’t be taking place.

Sanchez wants the investigators from the Nevada State Athletic Commission to test Canelo’s hair follicles for the clenbuterol, and he wants them to find where he purchased the tainted meat in Mexico. The idea behind testing Canelo’s hair follicles is if he’s been using a lot of clenbuterol and not just having eaten it twice, the drug might still be in his hair.

“We all have our ideas and suspicion, of course. You have to have suspicions,” Abel Sanchez said to Fighthub about Canelo’s positive drug test for clenbuterol. “He’d be suspended. If it was Golovkin, it wouldn’t be the experts (VADA and the Nevada State Athletic Commission) that would suspended him. It would be Golden Boy, because they don’t want the fight, but they know it’s a fight they have to fight. I think we wouldn’t be talking right now. We’d [Golovkin] would be suspended,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez isn’t the only one that believes that another fighter would be suspended if they tested positive for clenbuterol. Tim Bradley believes that if this was another guy and not someone popular, they would be suspended after testing positive. Bradley doesn’t think Canelo will be suspended because he’s popular and the Golovkin fight will make a lot of money. Golovkin wouldn’t have the benefit of using the same tainted meat excuse that Canelo is, because he lives in Los Angeles and not Mexico.

Golovkin would look silly saying he ate tainted meat in Los Angeles or in Kazakhstan. Canelo has the advantage when it comes to the excuses for getting cleared from testing positive for clenbuterol. He can blame it on the meat in Mexico. Sanchez still thinks it’s a lame excuse, because he thinks Canelo and his trainers would know all about the meat problem in Mexico. Sanchez says Canelo’s trainer Chepo Reynoso is in the meat business as a butcher in Mexico, and he thinks odd that he wouldn’t be monitoring Canelo’s meat intake and making sure that he didn’t eat the tainted meat.

”I just hope Canelo is clean and the fight goes off and we can prove who the better man is,” Sanchez said. ”I’m hoping it’s investigated for sure and it’s not just swept under the rug. Whether it be hair follicles or providing importation where he ate, and where it was bought, and whether it was a restaurant where he bought that meat,” Sanchez said about Canelo. “If you go back to those dates where he tested positive, and go back and find the timeline. I think he needs to be tested more stringently than he was before just to prove to us and the fans that he’s a clean fighter,” Sanchez said.

Canelo’s positive test probably will be swept under the rug and blamed on him eating tainted meat. It’s doubtful that the Nevada Commission investigators are going to be able to track down the dirty clenbuterol meat that Canelo ate (if that’s how he tested positive). It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to find the source. It’ll likely come down to the Commission having to take the word of Canelo where he bought the meat, and that’s be it. If the Commission had a hard rule where anyone testing positive was guilty, then it wouldn’t matter what excuse Canelo used. The Commission needs to think about setting up a rule that will prevent the fighters that use the meat excuse from being able to get cleared, because it’s impossible to weed out the guilty clenbuterol users from the innocent ones. If you penalize all of them, then you can be 100 percent certain that you’re catching the guilty ones as well.

“I think Golovkin’s main motivation now is he got robbed in the first one,” Sanchez said. “He didn’t get the glory of being the winner when he did win. So, I think that’s the motivation for him right now.”

The judges scoring the first Canelo-GGG fight a draw last September really cost Golovkin a lot of money. You can call it a robbery in terms of the money Golovkin lost by him not being given the victory. If the judges had given Golovkin a 12 round decision, he would have been able to demand a bigger purse split for the rematch with Canelo, because he was the winner of the fight. It’s unclear whether Golovkin even got a split.

Whatever the case, Golovkin would have been able to get a bigger cut of the revenue in the rematch if the judges had given him the victory. The 12 round draw was basically a do-over with the purse splits being the same as before. How could Golovkin ask for money when the first fight was a draw? Canelo’s promoter Oscar De La Hoya saw it as a clear win for his fighter, as did the other Golden Boy executives Bernard Hopkins and Eric Gomez. The draw was like Golovkin being robbed of a lot of money that he would now be making in the rematch with Canelo.

The only thing Golovkin can do now is make sure he wins the fight in such an obvious way that the judges can’t take the win away from him. Golovkin can then demand a bigger purse split for the third fight with Canelo, if there is a third fight. If Golovkin knocks Canelo out or beats him badly in the rematch on May 5th, then you would have to believe that Golden Boy Promotions will opt to steer their money maker to safer waters. Losing consecutive fights to Golovkin would likely wreck Canelo’s money apparatus in the same way Floyd Mayweather Jr. wrecked Manny Pacquiao’s money making ability after he beat him in 2015. I don’t believe that Mayweather’s win over Pacquiao is the reason why his PPV numbers dropped off after that. I think it’s more of a case of Pacquiao no longer being put in compelling fights by his promoters at Top Rank. Canelo might still be able to make good money on PPV if loses badly to Golovkin on May 5th. But if Canelo loses twice to Golovkin, then I think it would hurt him badly.

”I’m very surprised because Canelo is probably the biggest name that has ever tested positive,” Sanchez said. ”There are a lot of suspicions about it. Steroid users, the dirty fighters, are always one step ahead of the testers, and the fighters believe it and they get caught. To use the excuse of meat in Mexico, you had to have lived under a rock that this isn’t a problem down there. The excuse is kind of lame, but the experts need to determine that and the full extent of his involvement in it,” said Sanchez.

It sounds like Sanchez doesn’t believe Canelo’s meat excuse for clenbuterol. I don’t know what the Nevada Commission investigators are going to be able to turn up with their investigation of Canelo. I’d be surprised if they find anything at all that they’ll use to say he’s guilty of intentionally using clenbuterol.

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