https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5MQsDDfqLg
As part of the hype for his main event fight against Josh Barnett this Saturday night (Sunday morning local time) at the UFC Fight Night card in Saitama, Japan, “Big Country” Roy Nelson talked to Fox Sports. Being that this is his first fight since UFC brought in the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to handle drug testing and Barnett has a history of drug test failures, it’s not surprising that the conversation into the realm of performance enhancing drugs and testing. Specifically, he thinks that there are enough loopholes that the testing won’t change anything:
On the testing thing with PED’s, I think we are still in the same spot as we were before. We’re talking about it more but I think we’re in the same boat as we were before. I think it’s like the war on drugs, but they’re still being flown in.
[…]
For me it doesn’t matter. I’m not in the drug-testing business and I’m not an employee so I’m not worried about what guys are doing anyways/ You can do cocaine and still be OK. Jon Jones did that before. You could be like ‘I have an exemption and a doctor’s note that says it’s OK’ and as long as you put that out there it’s OK. As long as you put it out there like ‘Hey, I’m taking this because the doc says it’s cool,’ you can still take it and pass the USADA test, so it’s still cool.
For the record, Jon Jones failed a test for cocaine out of competition. Cocaine is not banned out of competition, and he shouldn’t have been tested for it in the first place. A lot of fans and even fighters don’t quite understand the distinction, but when it comes to “drugs of abuse” (non-performance enhancers), they’re generally just banned in-competition. The same applies to marijuana, though there are disputes as to how well the marijuana urine tests can track recency of use.
As for therapeutic use exemptions, USADA uses the World Anti-Doping Agency’s standards. That said, there are questions about whether or not they can be trusted after it came out that they gave Floyd Mayweather a retroactive exemption for an IV infusion.
Nelson finished his thoughts on drug testing with this thought:
You just kind of go with the flow. Drugs are bad. That’s what I’m going with now. That’s what they say to say now, so that’s what I’m going with. Before it was ‘drugs, just don’t talk about them’ so I’m just going with the flow. I’ve gone in fights where I know the guy is on stuff so it doesn’t really matter anyways. It’s just one of those things. As long as the fans know what kind of a person this is, that’s all that matters.
UFC Fight Night: Barnett vs. Helson airs this Saturday night on Fox Sports 1 (prelims on Fox Sports 2 and UFC Fight Pass) in the United States.
