Johny Hendricks at one point was the scariest striker at welterweight and even managed to capture the belt. His run in the UFC ended after he went a head scratching 3-7 in his last 10 bouts and he missed weight in 3 of his last 5. It was a hard fall from grace and fans were left with the question of what exactly happened to him. Johny partially blames USADA and their tenacious policies including the banning of intravenous fluids should a fighter struggle to make the target weight. Here’s what he told The MMA Hour…
I think USADA’s a great thing for the athletes, because it’s making people be clean, right? I took 26 tests, never failed one of the them. And that was in two years; I took 26 tests, never failed one of them. But what hurts the MMA aspect is that you can’t [use] IV bags. So, I’m a bigger welterweight, I walk around at 210. I’ve done that since I was 19 years old, walk around at 210, and the IV always brought me back. It helped me get back to life, it helped me get to where I didn’t feel like I cut weight. And once USADA come into play, I had to start walking around like 190 at best, and as you can tell, I do carry a lot of weight … and that’s sort of one reason why it just made it that much harder to make weight at 170… They’re there testing the IV bags, they’re doing everything like that, and I think you can bring back IVs, because I think there’s a lot of people that really used the IVs to help them fight better.
What do you think of USADA’s ban on IV’s? Check out the interview in the video below.