Nevada commission randomly tested Mayweather, Pacquiao in 2009
LAS VEGAS – Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao will finally meet in a ring on Saturday at the MGM Grand, more than five years after their teams came ever so close to putting a match together in early 2010.
The sides nearly came to terms on a deal in December 2009. Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum said all terms had been agreed upon when Mayweather demanded random Olympic-style blood and urine testing to scan for performance enhancing drugs. Arum said he recalls the date as being around Dec. 10, 2009, though he said he isn't certain.
That type of testing was not being done in boxing at the time and Arum said he, trainer Freddie Roach and Pacquiao were ignorant of what it entailed. After much back and forth, Pacquiao ultimately declined to participate in the testing.
"They told me they were going to insist on drug testing by this organization called USADA [United States Anti-Doping Agency] and it had never been done before," Arum said. "We were thrown for a loop. 'What is USADA? What is this? What is that?' We went back and forth. At the time we almost had it sorted out, they were telling Manny he could be drug-tested as he was going into the ring. It was all this crazy [expletive].
"Manny said there had to be a period of time before the fight where they will stop the testing. We negotiated that and we had an agreement on that and Mayweather walked away from it."
Just before Christmas 2009, then-Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer sent out a news release making public Mayweather's demand for testing. He said the fight would not go forward without it.
Talks carried into early 2010 before both sides moved on.
But Keith Kizer, then the executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission, didn't give up hope. He ordered surprise urine tests on both men, which were taken on Dec. 30, 2009.
Mayweather's test was analyzed at LabCorp in Cleveland and Pacquiao's at the Doping Control Centre in Malaysia.
Both men passed the surprise tests, though they did not test blood or perform a carbon isotope ratio test on either man.
"I thought the fight was going to happen and that was such a significant fight, we wanted to get ahead of it and so I had them tested," Kizer, now a Nevada deputy attorney general, told Yahoo Sports. "Even though there was all the talk and everything in public about who would agree to what and when regarding the testing, I thought the fight was going to happen and so I went ahead and ordered it. We'd been in favor of testing as often as we possibly could."
Earlier in December 2009, Pacquiao filed a defamation lawsuit against Mayweather and several others regarding allegations he used PEDs. The suit was ultimately settled in 2012.
For their fight on Saturday, each man agreed to unlimited random blood and urine testing during their training camps and until fight night.
Though each has been tested at least seven times, perhaps more, the results have not been made public. Presumably they came up clean, because the fight would be off with a failure, but the results have not been released as of yet.
Popular Mayweather-Pacquiao video on Yahoo Sports:
