Frank Mir receives two-year USADA suspension for banned substance

Former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir will sit out two years for a violation of USADA policy.

The UFC announced Friday that Mir, who turns 38 next month, was suspended two years by USADA. Mir tested positive for a long-term metabolite of dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (DHCMT), following an in-competition test conducted after his knockout loss to Mark Hunt on March 20, 2016, in Brisbane, Australia.

The suspension is backdated to April 8, 2016, which means Mir will be eligible for reinstatement in just under a year.

USADA went into depth on its findings in a press release:

“DHCMT is a non-Specified Substance in the class of Anabolic Agents and prohibited at all times under the UFC Anti-Doping Policy, which has adopted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Prohibited List. The finding of a long-term DHCMT metabolite in Mir’s sample, which was identified through a new detection method by the WADA-accredited laboratory in Tokyo, Japan, led to Mir being provisionally suspended from competition on April 8, 2016.

“Upon learning of the positive results of the sample analyzed in Tokyo, USADA had all previously collected stored samples for Mir reanalyzed at the WADA-accredited laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah (SMRTL), which had also recently implemented methodology for the detection of newly identified long-term DHCMT metabolites. As a result of the additional analyses, SMRTL discovered that an out-of-competition sample Mir provided on February 5, 2016, which had previously been reported to USADA as negative for the presence of prohibited substances, was also positive for the same long-term DHCMT metabolite found in Mir’s in-competition sample.”

Mir (18-11), who has lost six of his past eight fights, has lobbied for release from his UFC contract several times since news of his test results broke, but has not been granted a release as of yet.