Ahead of this weekend’s light heavyweight title fight between Artur Beterbiev and Callum Smith, Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn talks to promoters about his concerns about Beterbiev having an atypical finding in a drug test with elevated levels of HGH and testosterone.
Hearn says because the result was an atypical finding and not an adverse one, he can’t contractually do anything about it, but he’ll continue to look into the matter.
Hearn on Beterbiev’s drug test
“There was an article released yesterday by Kevin Iole, obviously in conjunction with Top Rank, there was an atypical finding in Artur Beterbiev’s VADA test in December. Raised levels of HGH and testosterone.
“Not an adverse finding, an atypical finding, but still raised levels which as a promoter of a fighter in the other corner is a concern. So we’ve been working with VADA to try to understand the reasons why.
“It’s all out there for you to do you research and they’ll want us to be careful of what we say.”
On if he got a satisfactory answer
“Not really, no. There has been additional testing since, but not additional around those results, just the standard testing that follows. So in this one test there’s spike in these substances, and in tests the week after, there wasn’t. What we want to know is — we’re not scientists — we just want to know why was those levels raised and the questions we’ve asked VADA we will continue to ask…
“Contractually we can’t do anything about it because it was not an adverse finding but it was an atypical result of blood and urine of raised levels of HGH and testosterone.”