LOS ANGELES – Phil Baroni looked morose as he exited his hearing with the California State Athletic Commission on Wednesday. His suspension of one year had been reduced to six months, but his name was not cleared.
“It feels like a loss to me,” Baroni told reporters. “I’m convicted of using steroids. I didn’t use steroids. I thought I took enough tests to prove I didn’t. I wanted more than anything to prove I didn’t do it. To be cleared of it. And I’m not. I’m labeled guilty.
“I’ll be able to fight soon, but I still didn’t get what I wanted.”
Baroni testified in front of the CSAC board for nearly a half-hour, flatly denying any steroid use and speaking at length about his career and training methods.
The centerpiece of his defense was four separate steroid tests he took around the time of his fight. The first was taken at the behest of manager Ken Pavia, who claimed he ordered it prior to the fight after discovering one of the 67 supplements Baroni was taking carried a warning for causing false positives. Baroni said he didn’t want the test floating around for possible detection by the media, so he had his fiancé’s name used in the results.
Only hours earlier, Barry Sample, Chief Scientist of Quest Diagnostics, Inc., the testing firm for the CSAC, had given a presentation where he stated that a lab couldn’t get a false positive for an over-the-counter supplement because supplements which carried steroid precursors had been taken off the market.
Yet when pressed to explain the warning on Baroni’s supplement, or entertain the possibility of tainted supplements on the market, he was hesitant to give a definitive answer.
“It’s possible that the warning is related to a lower threshold level, but even then one would not expect products that are legally available … to cause such an elevation in the T/E ratio,” Dr. Sample told a committee member.
“So when you say one would not expect, it could happen?” the committee member responded.
After a labored pause, the doctor spoke up. “It is difficult for me to say what manufacturers may do.”
The “chain of custody” issue that played a part in Ultimate Fighting Championship lightweight champion Sean Sherk’s hearing also had an impact on Baroni’s case.
Baroni’s fourth and final test was done at an independent laboratory using the remainder of the urine sample obtained by the CSAC. Deputy Attorney General Karen Chappelle immediately attacked the credibility of the lab, saying the sample’s chain of custody couldn’t be verified. The laboratory was not on a list that the CSAC had provided to Pavia, however, he had documented that he had met the commission’s requests to verify the lab as an accredited facility.
Ultimately, the CSAC had signed off on the transfer of the sample from Quest Laboratories to the new lab, making them part of the chain of custody.
Pavia’s admission of Baroni’s false-named steroid test didn’t win any honesty points with the commission, but the government’s discrepancies in judging the validity of the third-party test raised sufficient doubt to prevent an unchanged ruling.
When the committee came to a vote, two commission members moved to strike all charges against the fighter. That motion was denied, but an amended motion to reduce his sentence passed easily.
Baroni’s first plan was to get back into the gym and get on with his life.
“I want to start training and getting back in shape,” he said.
“I’ve been depressed with all this. It’s hurt my relationships with family, with friends, my fiancé. It’s the first thing I think about in the morning and it’s the last thing I think about when I go to bed. People are going to believe what was put out there originally. It’s not like I got let off where I can say ‘see, I didn’t do it.’ I’m glad I didn’t get a year, but what can I say. I’m just upset that it happened.”
Like Sherk, Baroni claimed he spent at least $20,000 on his defense, not including missed fight paydays. As for a return to the ring, Pavia hoped that Baroni would be put on Strikeforce’s January card.
