Gervonta Davis has entered the Ryan Garcia PED controversy, defending Garcia and accusing Devin Haney of also working with a disgraced PED doctor. Davis tweeted a clip of Haney admitting he works with Victor Conte, the infamous founder of BALCO laboratories who facilitated PED use programs for several high-profile athletes.
In the clip, Haney says “Victor Conte has helped me tremendously” and defends working with Conte despite his past involvement in scandals, saying “people can change.” Davis also shared a suspect image appearing to show Haney with bumps all over his stomach circled in red, insinuating Haney may be using PEDs himself.
Victor Conte’s BALCO was at the center of a major PED scandal in the early 2000s. He pled guilty in 2005 to money laundering and illegal distribution of ster*ids and was sentenced to 4 months in prison and 4 months home confinement. Several elite athletes like Marion Jones and Barry Bonds were implicated in the BALCO affair for using Conte’s “designer” PEDs.
The Twitter activity from Davis comes after Ryan Garcia tested positive for ostarine and a metabolite of nandrolone after a win over Devin Haney. Garcia maintains his innocence, saying he never knowingly took banned PEDs.
By sharing the clip of Haney and appearing to accuse him of PED use, Davis seems to be attempting to discredit Haney and defend Garcia in the wake of the positive tests. The boxing world continues to be rocked by this PED controversy.
Interestingly, the bumps on the stomach are probably not indicative of PED use despite the fans often pointing to them.
Recently UFC star Khamzat Chimaev got a lot of scrutiny for this picture:
P2P Champion Kamaru Usman was also noticed with plenty of bumps on his stomach at different times – as did one of the greatest of all time Georges St. Pierre.
But it doesn’t stop there – a proven PED user Vitor Belfort was also spotted in the past with some giant bumps.
So are all these injection spots to facilitate PED use? Not so fast, one expert claims.
“This is a fatty deposit, that’s a very slow growing, it’s essentially a benign tumor. This is something that is non carcinogenic, or at least you’d hope. So, as far as I know, the majority of them, if not all of them are essentially benign. And they are just slow growing like fat deposits in the subcutaneous layer. So this is something that is genetic, to some extent as well. I don’t know if it’s diet related, if it’s any, like a lot of it is genetic predisposition at the end of the day. And the reason you can see it in these guys mainly is because they’re so lean. So when you have this mark up here, this mark up here, these bumps all over the f–ing place, it’s a result of your lack of body fat and lack of subcutaneous water to for a lot of these guys doing heavy weight cuts, and you see any sort of abnormalities appear on the surface of the skin or otherwise they would have been shrouded in fat and water. ”
He later continued: “How do you know it’s not HGH and insulin? Reason being is you would never inject your HGH and insulin up here at the top of your stomach – down here is where you would inject the intramuscular is in general, where you would pin oil based compounds…”
“So hypothetically, if you’re trying to avoid doping, you know, you might intramuscular chute your insulin or your HGH or your whatever, depending on the circumstance, sometimes the pharmacokinetic profile will not make it actually clear faster, if you do it intramuscular. Tt kind of depends on the situation. But anyways, like in general, if you pin something intramuscular fat is going to take longer to absorb something. So it’s why you can altered the kind of like half life of a testosterone, for example, if you pinned it into your subcutaneous fat layer, because this is an oil based compound that takes a long time to otherwise, you know, cleave the ester and get fully absorbed into the serum. And when you’re introducing into fat tissue, you’re just making it more difficult for your body to break it down essentially, whereas for you know, water based compounds.”