Junior Dos Santos was removed from UFC 215 after being suspended by USADA. The result was reportedly for the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide which his team denies him taking adamantly. Someone came to his rescue but it’s not who you would expect.
Former UFC heavyweight champ Fabricio Werdum publicly defended JDS by saying he would wait for the B sample results to come back. Here’s what he said to MMAFighting.
I think it’s a pity that this happened, but we have to wait for the second test. We don’t get along because we fought in the past, but there’s no reason to say anything bad about him. That can happen to anyone, to unknowingly take something that is banned. I have no right to say anything about this case. We have to wait for the the second test to find out if he really took something. If he really took something he has to pay for it without fighting for a while, which is a pity.
I think that this testing is too much, too strict. It didn’t have to be that much. It’s one thing to take something to recover faster… I’m not saying steroids, no. What I say is that USADA is too much sometimes. It’s too much. It didn’t need that much. This testing is stricter than the Olympics. I’ve never seen this before. I think it could be better. There are things that you could take that wouldn’t affect your performance, but you would recover faster. We train too hard.
One of the reasons why Werdum is critical of the USADA is because his teammate Lyoto Machida was suspended 18 months after declaring his usage of a product containing the banned substance 7-keto-dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). It was not considered a tainted supplement because 7-keto-DHEA was listed as an ingredient, but its effectiveness as a performance enhancer is questionable.
Anyone is subject to going through this. Sometimes it’s not even something you take knowing it’s illegal, but you unknowingly take something in your supplement. It’s tough. We have to call and check everything you take all the time, anything you eat or any supplement you take. It can happen to anyone. When you talk about doping people think of the extreme of the extreme right away, but it’s not like that. Sometime it’s pretty simple, like what happened to Lyoto. It was really unfair, and he stayed away for almost two years because he said he took something (he didn’t know was banned). That was absurd.