World Boxing Council pleased with cooperation of champions, top fighters in drug-testing program

The World Boxing Council revealed Thursday that all but one of its champions has enrolled in the sanctioning body’s Clean Boxing Program, which mandates yearlong, round-the-clock scrutiny of the fighters.

WBC champions include middleweight Gennady Golovkin, heavyweight Deontay Wilder and super-flyweight Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez.

“We’re very happy with the cooperation,” said Luis Miguel Escalona, the WBC safety committee chairman.

The program, introduced earlier this year first with an education program for the fighters, emerged after Escalona and late WBC President Jose Sulaiman witnessed a bulked-up fighter in the past decade and moved for more stringent testing than urine screens for recreational drugs.

“People told us we’ll lose fighters, that nobody cares about the belts anymore, that they’ll see, ‘People come to see me fight, not to look at my belt,’” Escalona recalled.

But Sulaiman’s son, current WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman, revived the call this year and employed the Voluntary Anti-Doping Assn. (VADA), headed by Margaret Goodman of Las Vegas.

VADA has received acclaim by anti-doping insiders for its interest in unearthing positives by striking for test results around the clock and for liberally employing Carbon Isotope Ratio screening that has proved effective in identifying synthetic testosterone.

VADA detected the banned energy boosting meldonium in heavyweight Alexander Povetkin of Russia earlier this year, scrapping his fight against Wilder and making him pay for follow-up testing before his eliminator Saturday against Bermane Stiverne.

Facing a Dec. 31 deadline, all 15 WBC champions with the exception of Japan’s bantamweight champion Shinsuke Yamanaka have enrolled, and the fighter has informed Escalona he will by the Dec. 31 deadline that will see his belt stripped if he doesn’t.

Sulaiman has sought to add further teeth to his program by informing the top-15-ranked fighters in each division that they’ll be ejected from the rankings if they, too, haven’t signed up by the end of the year.

He ruled super-welterweight Cedric Vitu of France out of consideration for a title eliminator Wednesday due to his reluctance to enroll.

New top-15 members will be given 30 days to register.

Among those subject to being dropped from the rankings for non-compliance are heavyweight Dereck Chisora, No. 7 super-middleweight Arthur Abraham, No. 13 middleweight Willie Monroe, former super-welterweight champion Liam Smith, former lightweight champion Anthony Crolla and No. 3 super-flyweight Juan Francisco Estrada.

Goodman said she continues to push athletic commissions to demand the type of testing the WBC employs.

“We need to get them to step it up,” Goodman said. “A lot of these commissions just do these insta-tests, and all that’s testing for is for like seven things, stimulants and narcotics. I get the importance of that, but the main things that will kill you in a ring or contribute to CTE are the things these guys are taking that [the commissions] are not even [looking for].

“We talk about high-profiler guys, but there are a lot of journeymen out there fighting, and if this continues, how dangerous is that?”