Five Thoughts on Daton Fix’s USADA Suspension

Yesterday it was announced that Daton Fix will be receiving a one-year suspension for testing positive for ostarine during a USADA test on Feb. 10, 2020. After reading through some of the notes on the investigation and what happened I thought I’d give my thoughts on the situation.

1. It Could Have Been a Lot Worse

The punishment for this ultimately won’t result in Daton missing much time in competition. Had this been a normal year in history without a global pandemic, Daton may have missed the Olympic trials and the Olympics and any other event that would’ve occurred in the last seven months.

Thanks to COVID-19, he may miss a portion of the NCAA season and won’t be able to wrestle in much senior level competition to prep him for the Olympic trials, but he will become eligible again on Feb. 10, which would allow him to compete in the Big 12 and NCAA tournament (if they have them) and the Olympic trials. So overall the timing of this was favorable for him because he’ll miss some stuff, but not what he could’ve had this been any standard year.

2. OSU May Have Some Options to Lessen the Blow

Daton is in a unique spot. Last year he took an Olympic redshirt and, as long as this doesn’t impact his ability to take another this year (I don’t believe it does), he will have that option. Doing so could allow him to avoid this ban impacting any of his time in NCAA competition. He would just come back and start the 2020-21 season as a sophomore.

But that’s a lot of ifs. If he does that he’ll be a 23-year-old sophomore with three years of college competition still ahead of him. You know a lot of people go to college for seven years. But that is pretty old for a college student and would likely require him to go onto grad school and stay around in college for a long time. Does he even want to do that? Does John Smith want that or think that’s what’s best for him? It will be interesting to see if they exercise that option and he takes another Olympic redshirt and how OSU’s lineup will look next year if that’s what they do?

3. I Believe the Story

I know a number of people look at me as some incredibly biased Oklahoma State homer that sees no fault in the Cowboys, but I really do try to view things with a certain level of neutrality and here’s my take.

1. He passed a polygraph
2. It was a “very small amount” according to USADA and he passed all the subsequent tests
3. Most of all, it doesn’t make sense to me to come up with a story that implicates your dad and assistant coach as the people that ultimately got this into your system

Polygraphs aren’t foolproof and could be passed even if someone’s lying, but it’s certainly a very positive sign that he did pass.

I don’t know anything about ostarine, but according to the findings in the investigation it was a small amount, then he passed all the tests following it that would seemingly indicate it was a one-time thing and was out of his system shortly after. Still, there are crazy ways to pass those things, and they certainly could’ve found ways around that.

The final point is this, and to me it’s the thing that makes me most feel that Daton was being honest here. In the findings it stated that Daton drank a drink from his parents fridge and that drink was something that Daton’s dad had been taking and that it was recommended to him by Chris Perry.

In all honesty that seems somewhat farfetched and I realize that Daton’s dad would probably be more willing to fall on the sword for his son. But if they were concocting a cover-up, why make it one that implicates the assistant coach as the person that gave you the stuff? If this was made up, I would’ve expected him to say he was acting alone or got it off the street from a stranger or something of that nature. By implicating a staff member as the other person involved it’s arguably a worse look for the program than Daton failing this and being found at fault for it, which could easily be isolated to that one individual. If it was made up I would think they would’ve gone the direction of implicating just about anyone else besides an assistant coach.

4. Perry and Derek Fix Were Recommending Using Ostarine to Each Other?

Going with the fact that I believe Daton’s story to be true, there’s still the fact that the RTC coach was recommended ostarine by an assistant.

To that point, I don’t personally really care if a person that’s not in some sort of competition chooses to use a drug to get themselves in better shape. So if these guys want to use that stuff that doesn’t really bother me, go to most gyms and you’ll find plenty of folks that do. But if you’re the RTC coach, parent of an athlete, and an assistant who has a lot of contact with athletes, stay as far as humanly possible away from that stuff or anything like it. Ultimately you really have to hope this was truly isolated to this one case and one issue.

5. Everyone Loves a Comeback Story

It’s going to be a blemish for Daton and everyone involved. He’s always been viewed with a pretty clean cut image in the sport. He’s a likable kid, he’s a big-time wrestler, and that’s put him in the lime light a lot over the years.

Unfortunately the world puts this huge amount of pressure on these student athletes and builds them up as the godlike figures when in reality they’re just kids. I’m certainly not an infallible human being and have made my fair share of mistakes in life as many of us have. There are countless athletes that have had their legacies tarnished by stuff like this, but Daton really is very young in his senior-level career and certainly has the time to shake this off.

USADA will be all over him now and he’ll be under a bit of a microscope in the public’s eye moving forward. Time heals most wounds though and if he can win moving forward and not have any more USADA issues this controversy will slip further and further into obscurity.