Randy Couture: The UFC Moved To Ban TRT So They Wouldn’t Be Implicated

UFC legend Randy “The Natural” Couture has never hid his disdain for UFC President Dana White. The two had a highly publicized contract dispute that kept Couture out of action throughout most of 2008 and delayed his long-awaited bout with Brock Lesnar, a fight that ultimately resulted in “The Natural” losing the title to the hulking former champ.

Couture retired from MMA after getting knocked out by a Lyoto Machida flying front kick at UFC 129 in April 2011, but he’s still very much involved in the sport he helped bring to the forefront.

The multi-division champion recently spoke up to Submission Radio about the UFC’s decision to ban TRT. Couture took a new stance; one that implied the UFC was looking to clean their hands by outlawing the controversial treatment:

“In a small way it implicated the UFC when they highlighted Vitor Belfort who had a TRT exemption and he said he never heard of TRT until the UFC doctor turned him onto it and told him what it was all about, was I think one of the reasons why the UFC, they didn’t want to be implicated, they didn’t want to be party to that so they moved for the commissions to ban the exemptions.

Whether the UFC is helping them find doctors to do that appropriately or not doesn’t really matter in my opinion. I think they were just trying to cover their butt by pushing the ban on exemptions through. The whole thing, I mean, how many guys have we had come up positive (for PEDs). That, in my opinion, is worse than the TRT. At least they’re going through proper protocol and using conditions and doing the right thing.”

It sounds like “The Natural” is suggesting that the UFC was on both sides of the fence with TRT, facilitating its use to Belfort but then pushing for it to be banned so they could allegedly make it seem like they were against the therapy all along.

While Couture obviously has some bad blood from his past dealings with the promotion, it’s definitely a new and interesting take on a topic that has been literally beat to death. Fighters gaining exemptions for TRT has come and gone, and those who used it really didn’t do all that well in the Octagon.

Except Belfort, whose power and physique rose to absolutely unmatched levels while benefitting from TRT.

So, if the UFC turned him onto TRT to help incite his rabid streak of insane headkick knockouts and then fought to get it banned when “The Phenom” became the poster boy for everything that was wrong with PEDs in MMA, then there is unquestionably a cause for concern.

No other reports have surfaced implicating the UFC in actually advising their doctors to prescribe Belfort TRT, and we will probably never know the real details of the situation.

However, Couture’s words have to at least raise some eyebrows over how the whole scenario went down. Do you think the UFC pushed the ban through so fast to cover their own interests?