July 7: Jeff Novitzky and the War on Doping in Professional Sports
If you were a top professional athlete using performance-enhancing drugs during his time as an investigator, Jeff Novitzky was likely to become your worst nightmare.
With a background in athletics, Novitzky was the relentless and exacting nemesis of celebrity dopers including Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Lance Armstrong and others. If Novitzky had you in his sights, you were going down. It was only a matter of time.
Jeff Novitzky is a former federal law enforcement agent currently spearheading Las Vegas’ UFC anti-doping program. Over his 22-year career he’s investigated some of the highest profile athletes and criminal performance-enhancing drug cases in history. In this Mob Museum program, Novitzky will share his experiences with some of those investigations, techniques he used, and evidence he collected to find and stop those athletes who cheated to win.
This program will give you Novitzky’s take on PED abuse in sports, including:
- Doping in baseball, with names such as Roger Clemens and Gary Sheffield, as well as details of Barry Bonds’ case – which drugs he used and what happened to his career home-run records.
- Football and doping with a look at Dana Stubblefield and the Balco scandal.
- Women athletes and PEDs, with a focus on track and field’s Marion Jones’ case.
- The most sophisticated doping operation in the history of international professional bicycle racing, engineered by Lance Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team, and involving star team members George Hincapie, Tyler Hamilton, and Floyd Landis.
- Why Novitzky left his 22-year federal law enforcement career to oversee the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC’s) anti-doping program here in Las Vegas.
Spend an afternoon with Jeff Novitzky as he talks about the athletes he’s pursued, the cases he’s solved, and why he cares so deeply about eradicating performance-enhancing drugs from sports.