Sherdog sat down with a somber Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal to discuss his positive test for the anabolic steroid Drostanolone following his defeat of previously unbeaten Lorenz Larkin on Strikeforce’s Jan. 7 card in Las Vegas.
King Mo is adamant that he did not knowingly take a PED, and never, ever has.
Lawal's manager Mike Kogan previously said that the fighter was injected with the anti-inflammatory steroid Dexamethasone three to four weeks before the fight. However, Dexamethasone is only banned during competition, if at all, and Kogan verified with the physician that the injection would have no bearing on a pre fight PED screening.
The camp's leading candidate for the positive test is a number of supplements that Lawal takes as part of his fight preparation.
“My track record speaks [for itself],” implored Lawal. “I’ve been through college and NCAA drug testing, you see what I mean, I’m a clean athlete. I’ve been tested through USADA and WADA for international competition and I’ve always been clean … This is my first positive test for anything, I don’t even know what to say. All I know is that the truth will come to light and I know that I’m a clean athlete, I know that I can guarantee that I am a clean athlete.”
“I’ve never used any performance enhancer in my life."
“Right now we’re just looking over everything and trying to come to a conclusion because it’s ridiculous, man. I’m in shock. All I can do is keep on looking at my supplements. I don’t even know what to do. I just keep looking over my supplements to see what we can find.”
“I appreciate my family and friends and real fan support and those staying behind me and I’m going to clear my name and then it will be back to fighting.”
“I’m pretty confident my name will be cleared ... I haven’t even thought about any punishment at all. I’m staying pretty positive … if you think about the worst-case scenario you’re going to stress yourself out. I’m not trying to think about the worst-case scenario at all.”
The worst case scenario is that the PED test is upheld, and Lawla is suspended for up to a year. Kogan offered a less hopeful reflection on the case than did Lawal.
“It’s unfortunate in this scenario -- not just our scenario -- but this scenario when anyone tests positive you are kind of doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t. It’s not innocent until proven guilty; it’s guilty even if you are proven innocent. The only way to reverse people’s perception is if your test was a false positive, period.”
“We were unaware of this drug, both of us ended up spending most of the day Tuesday Googling the s--- just to figure out what it is and once we found out what it is and what its primary use by athletes is we became even more baffled then before. It’s primarily used to maintain muscle mass while cutting weight, it’s basically a weight cutting supplement. It’s something Anthony Johnson should be looking into so he can make weight, not something an athlete who walks around at 212 pounds in camp and 208 after a training session would need. If anything, it would hinder his performance; it would dehydrate him and make it impossible for him to train.”
“Our position is not necessarily that we are challenging the commission’s findings. As a matter of fact, our position is not to challenge the commission’s finding or their chain of custody or who touched the pee or who moved it where and who did what because then you just start to raise a bunch of conspiracy theories and unnecessarily cloud things and make things more complicated than they are.
“Mo has never knowingly and never will knowingly put anything in his body that is illegal or is somehow enhancing his performance … All we can do is present his track-record and his past history and make a statement as to what he himself has knowingly done and let the chips fall where they may. We’re not going to spend the next year running around taking polygraphs, yelling from the top of tall buildings that we didn’t do anything because the more you do it the more guilty you look.”
“We have not requested the “B” sample to be tested, simply because we’re still trying to figure out what could have caused this under the assumption that all the tests were done accurately. Now, if we go through all of this and try to dissect as much of this as we can and talk to as many people as we can who can help us understand this stuff and what have you, and we find absolutely nothing that could have even remotely come close to testing for this stuff, then we will request the “B” sample to be tested just in case something went wrong or something was inaccurate.”
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