The World Boxing Association made the official presentation of its new program “Fair Boxing”, to fight the use and abuse of prohibited substance in boxing. The launch was made during a press conference held on Monday 13, 2017 in Panama city, Panamá.
Fair Boxing is a join program held by WBA and Voluntary Anti-Doping Agency (VADA) that will gather all the WBA rated boxers.
Fair Boxing was first applied at the first time on March 11, on the WBA super welterweight title fight between Demetrius Andrade and Jack Culcay.
“This was possible thanks to the WBA Medical Committee who gathered here in Panama to make Fair Boxing a reality. This is also the result of a working meeting with my colleague Mauricio Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council, we agreed that pre-competition anti-doping tests is more important than post-combat test, because there are substances that do are not detected after the confrontation” said Mendoza
“However, we also plan to give value to education. We will not solve the problem by sanctioning the athlete; we rather educate him to avoid this. For that reason we will make seminars and courses to complete this Project. We will encourage our medical committee members to give constant advise to our boxers as to what kind of medicine can or cannot be taken to avoid unintentional errors that could jeopardize the boxer’s career”, Mendoza added.
The creators of this project are doctors Larry Lovelace, Jorge Ramirez, Calvin and Shivana Inalsingh, who received the support of Dr. Margaret Goodman. They updated the WBA anti-doping regulations.
From now on, all the rated boxers should register with Fair Boxing, if they wish to fight for WBA titles. They will get random anti-doping tests in search of a better control and ensure fair boxing.
Fair Boxing, joins forces with WBC Clean Boxing, the modern version of the KO Drugs Program born in 1989 to fight the curse of drugs with boxing festivals and sport talk. In that time every fight supervisor had to collect the post-fight urine samples, and will be in charge of the chain of custody, until they were analyzed.
This proves that the World Boxing Association has led the way in the fight against drugs.
