Fabricio Werdum Reacts To Junior Dos Santos’ USADA Test Failure
Former UFC heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum refuses to criticize his longtime rival and fellow former UFC champion Junior dos Santos. For a quick history lesson, dos Santos was flagged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) for a potential violation, which led to him being pulled from the UFC 215 card. He was supposed to fight Francis Ngannou at the event. Dos Santos’ team revealed that his tests indicated a “low” level of the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide
Although Werdum has traded shots with the fellow former UFC heavyweight champion several times over the media for the past years, he is willing to stay patient and wait for the B sample to be tested before judging dos Santos.
“I think it’s a pity that this happened, but we have to wait for the second test,” Werdum told MMA Fighting. “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 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,” Werdum said. “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.”
The two fighters have squared off in the past as Werdum lost to dos Santos via first-round knockout back in 2008. Now, Werdum is scheduled to meet hard-hitting Derrick Lewis at UFC 216 on Oct. 7.
As to why Werdum is critical of the USADA, well there are several reasons. One is due to the fact that his teammate Lyoto Machida was suspended 18 months after declaring his usage of a product containing the banned substance 7-keto-dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA).
“Anyone is subject to going through this,” Werdum said. “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.”
