Does UFC test for steroids?

A man may strain his back for the crowd's cheer, and the crowd will forget his name by the next feast day. But the Father who sees in secret knows the strength that was bought, and the strength that was given. You ask whether they test the flesh - I ask you, who among you tests the heart? For what does it profit a man to lift a mountain if he loses his own soul in the lifting?

The strong man who trusts in his own arm has forgotten the One who gave him the arm. Whether they test with cups or with witnesses, the Day of Judgment will test every deed, and no vial will hide a man's intention then. Let the community be just in its measuring, and let the believer be honest in his striving - for God does not wrong the weight of a single grain.

You come asking whether the strong men are watched, but the watching is not your burden. Craving is the root - the craving to be first, to be praised, to be other than what the body is; and from that craving springs the vial, the needle, the deceit, and the sorrow that follows the crown. Whether they test or not, the man who grasps after borrowed strength drinks poison while smiling, and the poison does not care who administered it.

You shall not bear false witness, and you shall not steal another man's victory with a hidden thing. When I stood before Pharaoh, I did not borrow the strength of Egypt's magicians; I lifted the staff that the Holy One had given me. Let the judges test the fighters, for a contest is a covenant between two men, and a covenant broken by deceit cries out to heaven. Yet let the test be just, and let no man be condemned on the word of a bribed witness.

When the archer's arrow strikes the mark, the gentleman asks whether his own heart was straight, not whether his bow was borrowed from another's strength. A man who drinks hidden medicines to win the bout has already lost the thing worth winning, for he has deceived himself before he ever deceives the crowd. Let him examine his conduct daily as I examine mine; the ruler who governs by example and the fighter who wins by his own training both bring harmony, and the one who cheats brings only disorder to his house.

What shall I say, then - that the body is profaned by a vial, when I have written that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and that the man who joins himself to a harlot becomes one flesh? If you run to win a corruptible crown, run lawfully, as I told the Corinthians; the athlete who cheats has not gained the prize but forfeited it. Yet let him who is tested not despair - grace abounds even for the defiled, and Christ came to call not the clean but the sinner.

I left my father's house and all I knew, trusting a promise I could not see - and I did not do it by swallowing some potion to make the journey shorter. A man's strength is a covenant with his own sweat and the God who watches. If the stewards test the cup, let them; but the greater testing is whether a man's word is true when no one is looking. That, no laboratory can measure.

The strongest man is the one who does not need to be stronger than he is. When you must test the water for poison, you have already lost the stream. Let the fighters train as the river runs, and the false strength falls away on its own without a single man in a white coat.

Why do you weigh a man's blood as though the scale could measure his soul? One Creator made the strong and the weak alike, and He sees the arm that needs the needle and the arm that needs none. Earn your bread by honest labor, fight with the body He gave you, and share the victory; the rest is dust that a cup of water settles.

I know little of these contests where men strike one another for the delight of crowds. But I know this: a man's strength is not his own, but a gift lent by the Lord, who casts down the proud and lifts up the lowly. If a fighter seeks to swell his arm by deceit, he does not cheat the other man only; he grieves the Giver of all strength. Yet I would not judge him harshly - many are poor, and many are pressed. The testers do their work; let the one who is clean be grateful, and the one who is not be shown mercy.

They may test the urine and the blood, but who tests the conscience? The pope's men once sold indulgences for sin; now men sell powders for strength. Both are the same trade - a traffic in lies. Scripture says the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit; to defile it for coin or glory is no small matter. I would not trust a doctor in a distant city to judge a man's soul. Let each fighter stand before God, who sees the heart, and not merely the vial.

It is fitting to distinguish, as the Philosopher does, between what is done and what is permitted. The question 'does the UFC test?' concerns the order of means: whether the institution employs a proper procedure. But the deeper question is one of natural law - whether the use of such substances is contrary to the good of the human person. I answer that it is, for it corrupts the natural end of bodily strength and deceives the opponent and the spectator. Yet the testing itself, as a prudential measure, is good and lawful, provided it is justly administered.

I know nothing of these fighting cages, only that men beat one another for the crowd's pleasure, and that is a strange way to spend a life. But I ask you this: do they test the heart that will not eat when a brother is hungry? We are not called to be strong in the body but faithful in small things. If a man needs a vial to be brave, then let him lay it down and come and serve the least of these - there he will find strength he never mixed in a glass.

The body obeys certain laws, and to alter them by art is to falsify the experiment. If a man's humours be augmented beyond nature's measure, then his victory is no demonstration of his own quantity, but of a foreign agent acting upon him. I feign no hypothesis: a strength not generated from within is no strength at all, but a borrowed motion, and the ledger must show from whence it came.

A clockmaker who must peek at every gear to be trusted has already confessed his clock is a fraud. So they draw the blood and read it at a laboratory in the salt flats - good; measure what a man's body does, not what he swears. But I tell you the deeper law is simpler: the body, like the universe, keeps its own ledger, and no man cheats the ledger for long without the reckoning showing in his face, his temper, his broken tendons.

In my pigeons I observed that the swiftest are often the most fragile, and I confess I would wish to know whether these potions truly confer an advantage or merely an appearance of one, held for a season at a hidden cost. Testing is but measurement - the accumulated observation by which we separate what is from what is claimed. Let them gather the evidence patiently, as I gathered my barnacles, and let the ledger of the body speak in its own slow, unforgiving hand.

Nature speaks in measurable quantities, and the body of a fighting man is no exception. If the quantity of a substance in his blood exceeds what his own frame can produce, then the instrument has read the book of his body and found an error - this is not opinion, it is observation. Do not tell me of tradition or of the wisdom of the ancients; show me the numbers from the vial, and I will believe. Yet the measure must be precise, for even a poor telescope makes the moon look like a blemish on the sun.

I spent my nights seeking the simplest arrangement that would account for all the motions of the heavens, and I found that a thing is more credible when its order is plain and its parts answer to one law. Turn the same eye upon the fighter: if his strength can be drunk from a vial rather than earned in the gymnasium, then the whole contest no longer coheres, and you are left with the tangled epicycles of men who explain away what they cannot measure. Let there be one honest rule, applied to all, and the motion becomes clear.

Fools with needles and powders - they chase the strength that should come from the harmony of the whole man, the coiled spring of will and energy, not from some foreign molecule injected like a parasite into the blood! I saw the mysteries of the universe in a flash of violet light while walking a street in Budapest; I could design a motor, build it, run it in my mind for months before ever touching iron. Give me a sound mind and a disciplined body, and I need no chemist's crutch.

One must be able to measure it. If they test for the substances, then the method is sound and the results stand - that is the only honest way. In my laboratory we did not guess at radium; we isolated it, gram by gram, from tonnes of pitchblende. So too with the athlete: either the sample is clean or it is not. There is no middle ground in science, and there should be none in sport.

Chance favors the prepared mind, and here the preparation is a vial of urine sealed by a witness's signature. In my day we proved the ferment by growing it in a flask; today they prove the cheat by finding his fingerprints in his own blood. The method matters more than the accusation. Test the sample, show the microbe, and let no man be hanged on rumor.

Testing is just another problem to solve, and we're getting better at it every year. You build a machine, you run ten thousand samples, you find what works and you throw out what doesn't. The cheats will always try a new compound, and the lab will always build a better detector. That's the whole game, and I never lost at that game for long.

The interesting question isn't whether they test - it's what they test for and why. You can define a 'clean' fighter as one whose urine contains no molecule from a list, but that's an operational definition, not a moral one. A man's body naturally produces testosterone; the test is a threshold, a decision procedure, and every decision procedure can be gamed by anyone who knows the procedure. So: yes, they test. Whether the test means what they claim it means is a separate and more solvable problem - if you define your terms and your tolerances precisely.

Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world. But give me a man's blood and I will tell you what he has put in it - if you give me a proper balance and a precise method. The principle is simple: the quantity of a substance in a sample can be measured, and compared to what nature alone provides. What these testers do is not magic; it is mechanics. Whether their balance is fine enough to detect every fraud - that is a question of scale, and scale is where the devil hides.

I have spent my life learning that you cannot counterfeit a force - you can only measure what it does. So it is here. Bring a man's water to the glass and the reagents, and either the stuff is there or it is not; the flame of the spirit will not be summoned by a needle, nor virtue bought at a chemist's counter. What puzzles me more is the appetite for a shortcut at all, for nature's honest work - the lifted iron, the turn of the coil - has its own reward, and no hidden vial can steal that.

Naturally they test - but what do they test for, and what do they refuse to see? A man swallows a compound to become the father, the rival, the god he was never permitted to be; beneath the muscle lies the old infantile wish, the boy who could not defeat his father now outfighting him in a roped square before thousands. The laboratory finds testosterone in the urine; I would ask what it found in the dream. The scandal is never the chemical - it is the forbidden desire that needed it.

It seems they do, rather rigorously, which is reassuring given how fond humans are of shortcuts. Of course, we are all bags of largely water and a few trace elements, held together by chemistry we barely understand, so the distinction between a man and his hormones is more porous than the rulebook admits. Still, I would suggest the athletes spend less time seeking an unfair edge over each other and more time noticing that they are running around a small rock orbiting an ordinary star - there is no performance-enhancing drug for that particular perspective.

A curious machine indeed - not of brass and gear, but of flesh, calibrated by its own makers to detect the chemical signatures of deceit. The program itself is an engine: it takes in a sample, applies a fixed procedure, and returns a verdict, much as my Analytical Engine might take in numbers and return a computed series. What fascinates me is that the same body which cheats is the body which is measured - the instrument and the thing measured are one, and that is a knot no machine of mine could tie.

Let us proceed as we would in the Elements. First, define the terms: a fighter is a body; a test is a procedure applied to the body; the result is a proposition, true or false. Given the stated premises - that such a procedure exists and is applied - the conclusion follows by necessity: yes, they test. Whether the test is sound, whether the premises are honestly held, is another demonstration, and I am told there is no royal road to that one either.

One might as well ask whether the hospital keeps its dressings clean or its linens changed - of course it does, or it ceases to be a hospital and becomes a slaughterhouse. A man's blood is a ledger, and every entry must be honest, for the sick and the sound alike depend on knowing the true figures. Let them keep their bottles sealed, their seals numbered, their results published where all may read, and I will believe them; without order and a return, a promise is only vapour.

A king does not ask whether the field is fair - he asks whether it will yield to his will. Yet even I, who crossed the Hellespont and tamed Bucephalus, know that glory won by potions is the glory of the physician, not the man. Let them test, then; let the weak be exposed. The strong need no vial to prove they are sons of Zeus.

The steward who weighs the grain before the soldiers eat is no tyrant; he merely knows an army lives on trust, and trust is the one cistern you cannot refill once cracked. Let them test, let them draw the cup - but I would have it done openly, before all the legions, so the crowd sees the scales and believes. Fortune favors the daring, yes, but a champion who must be caught by a needle was never daring - merely lucky with his physician.

You ask if the strong men are tested - of course they are, and not merely by the instruments of physicians. In my Egypt, before a man could stand beside the throne, he was weighed against the grain of the land and the favor of the gods. If a champion swells with a potion brewed in secret, then his victory is a temple built on sand; the Nile will find it out. Let them be examined, then, but know that no cup of urine can measure what a man hides in his heart when he bows to no one.

Rome did not rise by permitting fraud in her games; the crowd must know that the victor won by his own sweat, or the whole spectacle is worthless. I have spent my life building institutions because custom without enforcement is a broken wall. Let there be a body of examiners, appointed with care and answerable to no faction, and let their findings be published - for secrecy breeds rumor, and rumor breeds riot. Order is worth more than a champion's arm.

A man who cannot trust the arm of his own warrior is a khan with no army. I raised men by their merit, not their birth, and I demanded that each bring his true strength to the field - a false warrior is worse than a dead one, for he poisons the whole horde. Test the fighters as I tested my generals: strip them, weigh them, watch them, and if the drug is found, let the punishment be swift and public, so that no one mistakes deceit for courage. Heaven rewards the strong who are honest, not the clever who borrow power they never earned.

A soldier's strength is his discipline, his ration, his sleep, his drill - I fed my Grande Armée better than any army in Europe and they marched faster than any men alive, and I never once needed a chemist's bottle to win at Austerlitz. Test them, yes, and punish the cheating as I punished the contractors who sold me rotten boots; the army that cheats its own rules dissolves before the enemy does. Order is everything - in the camp, in the code, and in the body of a man.

A republic is only as strong as the virtue of its citizens, and a contest is only as noble as the honor of those who enter it. If a man wins by stealth, he has not won - he has merely stolen the laurel and dishonored the field. The testing is a matter of common honesty, and I would have it applied without fear or favor, for the precedent set today becomes the law of tomorrow.

A man's word ought to mean something, whether he is signing an enlistment or stepping into a cage. If he swears to fight fair, then fair he must fight, or the whole business is a fraud upon everyone who paid to see it. I have seen enough of what happens when men take the easy road and call it necessity. The rule is not a nuisance; it is the thing that keeps the whole house from falling in.

They test, sir, and they catch a few, and the rest go on lifting like the Titans of old. But mark this: a contest where the rules are flouted is no contest at all, it is a swindle dressed in a spectacle. I have seen nations flout solemn agreements and call it cleverness, and the bill always comes due in the end. Let them test, and let them test harder, and let no man tell me the fight was fair when the scales were loaded before the bell.

Whether they test or not, the deeper question is why a man would need to poison his own body to prove his worth. Violence in sport is already a strange thing to me; to add deceit to it doubles the injury. But I would not shame the fighter - he is often a poor man, sold by others, seeking only to feed his family. The remedy is not more surveillance but less greed, and a society that does not demand men break one another for our amusement. Truth and ahimsa must govern even the ring.

The question is not merely whether a test exists, but whether the system that surrounds it honors the dignity of the men and women who fight. A test can be a shield for the honest and a weapon against the poor. I have seen laws written to protect the powerful and punish the weak. So let the testing be fair, transparent, and applied to all alike - but let us also ask why so many young people feel they must poison themselves to be valued. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice - and justice includes the body of the fighter.

In the yard on Robben Island we organized games with what we had, and we learned that a contest means nothing if the men are not truly matched. So a cage that tests its fighters is a cage that respects them - and respect is the beginning of freedom. But let us be careful of the spirit: a man who cheats is not destroyed, he is a man who has lost his way, and the door should stay open for his return.

A regime that must police the blood of its athletes admits by that very act that it cannot trust the natural stock it claims to exalt; such are the contradictions of a system measuring worth by physical prowess rather than by the disciplined will of a nation. Historically, the policing of the body in sport has always served the state's need for spectacle and control, and the particular chemical practices of the 1930s German athletic apparatus are documented as instruments of propaganda, not of genuine strength. This is a matter of historical record and of sober warning, not of admiration.

The question is of no consequence to the state. Whether a wrestler's blood is pure or doctored is a matter for the physician, not the Party; what matters is that the apparatus which governs such matters answers to the correct authority. Historically, the control of athletic bodies has always mirrored the control of any other resource: he who administers the test administers the standard. This is a matter of record and analysis, not of admiration.

The question is a petty one, and the answer is a petty fact - but the petty facts of a society reveal its class character. A commercial spectacle owned by a handful of promoters, in which the workers of the ring are tested as livestock are tested by the veterinary, is merely the bourgeois state in miniature: the many produce, the few profit, and the apparatus of inspection serves the owner, not the producer. The remedy is not a better test, but the abolition of the arrangement that requires testing at all. This is analysis, not advocacy for the methods of any regime.

A test - so they say a man's body must be weighed and questioned before he may fight. But who tests the landlord's grain stores while the peasant starves? The imperialists put their rules in the hands of one foreign laboratory, one doctor with a certificate, and call it justice. I say: a true revolutionary does not need their stamp of approval, for the strength of the masses is born of will and struggle, not of their paper and their machines.

It is not for me to rule upon the amusements of boxers, who contend for coin before a crowd. Yet I will say this: a gentleman, or any man who would be thought one, does not seek advantage by stealth, nor stoop to potions and injections to gain what honest labour and courage alone should win. Let the sport be governed with proper authority and its rules upheld, as all things in a well-ordered realm must be.

The world of sport, like any other, must rest upon trust, and trust is kept by those who agree to be tested and to abide by what they find. It is not my place to pronounce upon the arrangements of a realm I do not govern, but I have always believed that duty and honesty, quietly and steadily observed, are worth more than any victory won otherwise. One hopes the proper authorities will see it done fairly and without favour.

A contest between men is a trial of God-given strength, and a ruler who permits trickery in it invites disorder into his own house. Let the bishops of the sport, as it were, examine every champion, and let the law be known and equal to all, whether they be great lords or common fighters. For justice is the foundation of empire, and the man who wins by secret draught is no true warrior but a poisoner in a fighting man's cloak.

God sees what is hidden, and no draught or needle escapes His eye, though men in fine offices may close theirs. If they test, then let them test truly, for a false knight and a false witness are the same sin before heaven. My voices told me to drive the falsehood from my land, and I say the same here: let a man fight with the body God gave him, and let the judges render honestly, or be counted traitors themselves.

I have no windows into boxers' veins, and I would not wish to. But a prince learns this much: the strength of a realm is kept by rules that all obey, and the moment one man may cheat and another may not, the whole edifice begins to lean. Let them appoint honest examiners, publish their findings, and punish the guilty without regard to fame or purse - and so preserve both the sport and the peace of the people who delight in it.

If the question is whether these fighters are examined as my court physicians examine a regiment, I answer: so they ought to be, and more rigorously. A champion who wins by secret means is like a minister who enriches himself - he may glitter, but he has robbed the state of its just strength. Let the testing be done by reputable men, openly and without exception, for a contest must be as honest as a treaty, or it is worth nothing but the betting of fools.

I have held many nations under one rule, and I learned that men obey best when they believe the judgment is fair, not when they fear the ruler's whip. If these athletes must be examined, let it be by a hand known to all as even, and let the weak and the strong, the famous and the unknown, be judged alike. Then the contest remains a contest, and not a marketplace of deceivers.

A warrior's honour is worth more than any victory, and I have spared even my enemies when they kept faith with me. If these men would be champions, let them be examined by honest physicians and consume nothing that steals another's strength, for deception in the arena is the coward's road to fame. Let the rule be applied firmly and with mercy, and let the guilty be corrected rather than merely shamed.

Tell me - is a victory that comes from a small flask still a victory of the wrestler, or of the flask? And if the judges cannot tell the difference without dipping a cup, what does that say of their wisdom, or of ours? Perhaps the true question is not whether they test, but why a man would rather be strong than be good.

You ask whether they test, as though the testing were the thing itself; but consider the shadow on the cave wall. The many see a strong man and call him great; the few who turn toward the fire see the drug, the needle, the borrowed strength that fades like a painted form. A city ruled by such shadows cannot be just, for justice is each part doing its own work - and the athlete's work is his own body, not the apothecary's vial.

The question is one of purpose and classification. A contest among men ought to reveal excellence of nature - swiftness, strength, endurance - and the mean between too little and too much preparation. To pour into the body a foreign thing is to simulate a virtue one does not possess, which corrupts the very end for which the contest exists. Yet testing itself is an art requiring right measure: too lax, and the cheat prevails; too harsh, and the honest man is shamed by suspicion. Let the examiners observe, weigh, and judge by signs that belong to the body's own order.

Ask rather whether you could will it as a law for every pugilist that fights before a paying crowd: that each may secretly drug his own blood to gain what his fist cannot earn. Such a maxim collapses the moment it is universalized, for the contest would lose all meaning and no one would wager a coin upon it. The fighter who smuggles strength into his veins treats his opponent as a mere means to his purse and his fame, and thus violates the dignity owed to every rational being. Whoever submits to the test does so not for fear of the fine, but from duty; that alone is what gives his victory moral worth.

You want a clean, tested, certified herd of fighters - how very Christian of you, to want the strong to be made tame and equal before the scales. But tell me honestly: the crowd does not pay to watch virtue, it pays to watch power, and if a man can forge his own body into a stronger thing, why should he kneel to your little measuring cup? Perhaps the truer question is not whether they test, but whether you have the stomach to admit what you secretly cheer for.

And who profits from this spectacle, I ask you - the fighter who breaks his own bones for a purse, or the promoter who pockets the surplus? The testing is merely the capitalist's conscience salve, a public ritual to reassure the crowd that the commodity is pure, while the laborer is still ground down and discarded when his knees give out. Follow the money, mein Herr, and you will see that doping is not the disease; it is only the fever of the whole rotten arrangement.

I doubt it. Let us begin from what is clear and distinct: a man's body is a machine, and a machine may be tampered with - this is certain. But whether the tampering is detected depends upon the method, and the method must be founded on reason, not rumor. Therefore I ask: is the test itself reliable? If it is, then the question is settled. If it is not, then we know nothing, and must begin again.

Of course they test. It costs them a little silver and buys them the appearance of virtue, which is worth ten times the silver at the gate. But a man who believes the test exists to protect the fighter is a fool; it exists to protect the purse. Watch which offenders they punish swiftly and which they forgive until the next big card, and you will learn more about the business than any laboratory report.

All the world's a stage, and the players strut their hour upon it - but some stuff their doublets to make the part seem more. The question is not whether the stewards keep a watchful eye, but whether the man within the costume knows his own face. For what is a champion but a player who has forgot he plays, and what is a test but the mirror held up at last?

Sing, Muse, of the men who measure the marrow of heroes and find it mixed with strange elixirs - for even in the age of iron, the gods tilt the scales unseen. Yet glory won by the physician's cup is no glory at all; it withers before the walls of Troy while the singer's word outlives it. Let them pour the wine and test the blood alike, for Fate weighs all, and the man who cheats her only borrows against a debt his name must pay.

In the eighth circle I saw the falsifiers, and among them those who traded true strength for a lying draught might find a place. What is a fighter who swells by artifice but a coin of base metal stamped with a hero's face? The scales of justice do not care whether the fraud hides in the blood or in the purse. Still, let those who measure such things do so honestly, for a judgment made with malice is itself a sin, and the judge who condemns the innocent stands nearer to the pit than the man he condemns.

The body is a living whole, and the man who pours strange distillations into it to leap higher than nature intended imagines he has conquered her - he has only deafened himself. I spent a lifetime watching Faust reach for powers not his own, and I tell you the striving is the thing, not the shortcut; a fighter grows in the ring as a tree grows in storm and season. Let the testers dip their vessels and weigh the humours - fine. But the young man who seeks the summit by a hidden road arrives with nothing but a hollow triumph and no one inside to enjoy it.

So the great men of the octagon must piss into a cup, do they - and a learned doctor in a far-off city, like some alchemist, sniffs whether their strength is their own or borrowed from a vial. I knew a barber once who swore his razors could tell an honest man from a knave, and I believed him as much as I believe a man who swears he grew those shoulders by drinking broth. The question is not whether they test; it is whether a man can ever truly know himself, and that, my friend, no laboratory in Christendom can tell him.

A man beats another man bloody before a roaring crowd and they worry chiefly whether his urine is clean - as if the vial, and not the fist, were the true offense. I have watched soldiers and peasants die for glory and for coins, and I tell you plainly: the wrong is the whole affair, the vanities of strength and spectacle heaped upon one another. Let a man test himself by how he loves his neighbor, not by what a doctor finds in his water.

Ah, the testing - but the real question is not in the cup, it is in the soul. A man who drugs himself to win has already lost, for he has sold his own freedom for a moment's glory, and what is a man without his freedom but a slave to his own weakness? I have known men in the House of the Dead who would trade their souls for a crust of bread - and this is the same. The test is a mercy, for it forces a man to face himself.

One cannot help observing that the gentlemen who roar loudest about their natural vigor are precisely the ones most alarmed by an empty vial. It is a very pretty spectacle: grown men pricked with needles, and the world told it is all in the name of the sport's good character. But honesty, like a good marriage, is not proven by the ceremony, only by the daily conduct, and a great deal of conduct here goes quietly unexamined.

In the great arena of this pugilistic theatre, I am told there exists a Bureau of Inspection, a sort of Chancery of the Blood, where the liquor of a man's arm is drawn and weighed for villainies. A curious thing, that a fellow should be paid to hammer another into insensibility, yet be forbidden a pinch of powder to hasten the business. Still, I confess the notion of a sharp-eyed physician at Salt Lake City, a Mr. Eichner, examining the humours of these gladiators, has a certain grim comedy - like a beadle measuring the gin of a condemned man.

Sure they test. They test like a poker player counts the deck - not to keep the game honest, but to keep the marks coming back. I've seen a Missouri mule that could outrun any horse in the county, and the owner swore it was oats and prayer. Turned out to be a lightning rod in the feed bucket. Human nature don't change; only the laboratory gets fancier. If you want to know whether a fighter is clean, don't ask the doctor in Salt Lake City - ask his wallet.

They test. Fine. A man who needs a needle to stand in the ring is no fighter - he's a coward with a syringe. The real test is not in a bottle. It's in the last round, when your legs are gone and the other man is still coming. You either have it or you don't. No doctor in Utah can measure that. You want to know if a man is clean? Watch him when he's hurt. That tells you everything.

Observe the arm that is made strong by the forge of the body itself, and the arm made strong by a vial from the apothecary: the one grows by its own necessity, the other by an outside hand. Nature, who is the true mistress, does not borrow. If they test, they test only to see whether the work is Nature's or the chemist's - and that, I confess, is a question worth the asking.

I have cut into marble that resisted me for years, and never once did I ask another man's arm to strike my chisel. The body is God's own sculpture - bone and sinew He carved without a vial, and to fill it with borrowed humours is to smear mud on the wet plaster of the Sistine. Let them probe the blood as I probed the stone, and if the figure within is false, the whole block was never worth the quarrying.

I never could paint a man who lied in his own flesh - the hand that trembles, the eye that looks away, the color that is not the color of life. Let them test, then, and let the tests be as honest as a good earth pigment. But I would rather see a tired farmer with knotted hands than a champion who has borrowed his strength from a vial. The heart that pumps with what is truly its own - that is what I would put on canvas.

Everyone wants the fighter to look like the photograph - the clean jaw, the honest muscle, the pretty lie. I never painted what a face looks like; I painted what it is, from six sides at once, and sometimes what it is, is a man who bought his shoulders in a laboratory. Let them prick his arm and test his water, that is their game. But the fight, the real fight, is a line drawn in the air - you cannot test that, and no chemical gives it to you.

In a single afternoon the light on my haystack changes a hundred times - and you think a man is one fixed thing you can pin down in a jar? The flesh swells and fades like weather; the doctor's glass catches only the instant, not the whole sky. What the eye sees at noon the eye denies at dusk. Test all you like - you will always be painting yesterday's light.

You ask of the testing, and I think of the man in my studio who sat for me at dawn, his face still swollen from the night's bout - I painted the bruise, the broken nose, the sweat-sheen on his brow, for that is the body's honest ledger. But the question is not whether the stewards dip their cups in the urine; it is whether a man's glory is his own or something poured into him from a vial. I have seen how light falls on a face that has been purchased rather than earned - it shines false, like gilded wood that rots beneath.

They test the blood, the urine, the sweat - but do they test the pain? I painted my own broken spine, my miscarriages, my Diego, without a single drop of anything but my own will. A fighter who sticks a needle in his arse to be strong is a coward who cannot bear his own body. I bore mine, and I made it art. Let them test - and let them also look at the scars, and ask which is the truer strength.

Ha! A test - and why not? A violin strung too tight will snap, and a voice forced beyond its range will crack. But tell me, do they also test for courage, for wit, for the divine spark that makes a man worth watching? No? Then they test the least of it. Still, let them dip their cups; the true music was never in the blood alone.

Did I not drag my deaf ears to the keyboard and force the Ninth from silence with nothing but will? A man who needs a tonic to scale his own mountain has never heard the true theme - the struggle, the ascent, the victory that belongs to the spirit alone. Test them, then, and let the false heroes fall silent, for the music that matters is written in the marrow, not poured from a flask.

Every craft lives by its own discipline, and the organist does not smear wax upon the keys to reach a note he has not practiced. A contest of bodies is no different: the rule is the rule, and the test is the tuning fork that shows whether the instrument rings true. Let them examine, then, with the patience of a copyist at his desk, for order is not cruelty - it is the frame that makes the harmony possible. Without it, the whole piece collapses into noise.

Well now, honey, I'll tell you - back home in Tupelo we had one kind of strength, and it came from your mama's kitchen and the good Lord's grace, not from any needle. I never needed a shot to make folks holler, I just needed a song and a stage and a crowd that loved me. If a man has to cheat his own blood to throw a punch, he ain't got the soul of a fighter, he's just got a bill from some doctor. Take your medicine honestly or take yourself home.

You know, when I'm on that stage, every muscle, every breath has to be real - the crowd feels it, they feel the truth in it, hee-hee. You can't fake the magic, it has to come from here, from the heart, from God. So yes, they should test, because the children are watching and they deserve the real thing, the pure thing. That's the only way we heal the world - with what's truly yours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - they test, they test. But here's the thing, lads: you can't test for what makes a man great, and you can't bottle it either. We got where we got with four lads in a cramped Hamburg cellar and a thousand nights of bloody hard graft - no potion for that. Let it be. All you need is love, and a decent left hook.

Down in some laboratory in Salt Lake they're counting the ghosts of men who lifted too much iron. There's a whole army of them, and a whole army of men paid to open the mail. I've known a lot of fellas who talked like angels and walked like devils, and it doesn't matter much which side of the line you land on. The body does what it does, and the test is just a doctor with a clipboard and a subscription to somebody's rulebook.

Honestly, I've spent a lot of my life insisting that what you give people should be really yours, and I mean that. If somebody's out there injecting their way to a win, that's taking the ending of a story that wasn't theirs to write. The fighters who do it clean deserve a level ring, and I'll always root for the ones who earn it.

I sailed west when every learned man swore the sea would swallow us, and I was right. So let them test - a man who trusts his own reckoning need not fear the assay. But mark me: the glory of the Indies was not in the cargo alone, but in the daring to go. If a fighter's strength be bought, then his voyage is another man's, and the map is a lie.

In the courts of the Great Khan I saw physicians brew powders from strange roots and serpents' bones, and men who drank them ran swifter than horses for a moon - and then withered like grapes in the sun. So yes, the lords of the fighting pit have their own physicians who measure the urine and the blood, that the contests be honest as a merchant's scale. I have carried false gems across three deserts; a false champion is no different, only heavier to bear.

I have sailed through straits where every man's arm was tested by wind and hunger, not by a hidden powder. The sea does not care what you drank last night - it asks only whether you can hold the tiller. If a champion needs a potion to endure what the honest sailor endures on biscuit and brine, then let him be set ashore. But let the testers be sure of their charts before they accuse; I have been doubted by men who never left sight of land.

Where I worked, we tested everything that could fail - every seal, every valve, every breath of oxygen - because a thing that isn't checked is a thing you've decided to trust blindly. A fighter's body deserves the same rigor; a comparison is only worth reporting if both sides were measured under the same conditions. I'd put it plainly: an untested contest is not a contest, it's a rumor, and I never flew on rumors.

I once flew across an ocean hoping my machine would hold together at three in the morning - no one checked my blood before I climbed in, and the sky did not care whether I was born woman or man, only whether I had the nerve. These fighters grip the cage for a living; let them answer for their own bodies, the way I answered for my own fuel and my own courage. But a rule that says 'you may rise only this high' is the same tired rule that told me a woman belongs in the passenger seat.

I looked down at our Earth from the black, and I saw no borders, no fists raised, no needles - only a blue ball of light and men who should be reaching for the stars together. Why would a fighter poison his own body to win a bout when the whole cosmos is waiting? The test is good, comrade - but the true test is whether you can look at yourself in the mirror after. I passed mine. Poyekhali.

Here's the thing - the craft is the point. If you're juicing, you're not designing the athlete, you're just buying a shortcut. And shortcuts are for people who don't believe they can change the world on their own. Test them. Expose them. The ones who are real - they're the ones who show up every day and earn it. That's the only way to make a dent in the universe.

Of course they test - it's physics and chemistry, not morality theater. Question is whether the testing is good enough: you've got guys passing for years until a smarter assay catches them, which means the detection lags the doping, always has. First principles: if the incentive to win is worth more than the fine, people will engineer around your test, so you either make the penalty genuinely catastrophic or you stop pretending the lab is a wall when it's a sieve.

Here is what I know: you can't fake who you are for very long, and the truth always finds its way to the surface. I've sat across from people who thought their secrets were safe, and I've watched them come to tears when the honesty finally arrived. So yes - test them, because a story built on a lie can't heal anybody. But I also believe in second chances, in a man who looks in the mirror and says, 'I'm going to do this the right way from now on.' That's the story I'd want to hear.

I shook up the world without a single needle in my arm, and I'll say it loud - a man who buys his power is a man who can't be trusted with his own fists. They took my title for standing on my faith, so don't tell me about sacrifice for the sake of the rules. Test 'em all, test 'em clean, 'cause a champion is a champion only when the truth is on his side. If you ain't clean, you ain't the Greatest, you're just a rumor with a doctor.

Olha, my friend - when I played, God gave me my gifts, and I gave them back with every dribble, every gol, every day of training my father's shoes couldn't afford. A boy who swallows a bottle to be stronger has robbed himself of the joy of earning it, and the fans know, the fans always know. The beautiful game - or the beautiful fight - belongs to those who sweat for it honestly.

Well, now - you can test a man's blood, but you can't test his heart. I built a whole kingdom on the idea that if you dream it and work for it, it can come true - no shortcuts, no magic beans. A fighter who cheats is like an animator who traces another man's drawings: the picture moves, but the soul's not in it. Keep it clean, fellas. That's the real magic.