Junior Dos Santos Claims USADA Made His Last Year ‘A Nightmare’

Former UFC heavyweight champion Junior dos Santos will finally return to the octagon when he meets Blagoy Ivanov in the main event of July 14’s UFC Fight Night 133 from Boise, but it’s been a long road to get there for him.

Dos Santos was provisionally suspended for testing positive for banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide in a normal USADA sample collection last August. He was then pulled from his UFC 215 bout against Francis Ngannou last September. After a lengthy adjudication process, however, “Cigano” and his Brazilian countrymen Antonio Rogerio Nogueira and Marcos Rogerio de Lima were found to have been flagged due to tainted supplements produced by a pharmacy.

He’ll now return when he was given a six-month suspension that has now expired, but the time – and the big fight with Ngannou – is gone for now. Dos Santos recently opened up about the frustrating times he experienced trying to clear his name to MMA Fighting, noting that he felt he was guilty until proven innocent. Ultimately, he feels his name is cleared, which was of the utmost importance to the knockout slugger:

“They stopped my whole career to investigate the thing,” dos Santos said. “I think that goes in the completely opposite direction of the law. I’m innocent until proven guilty. In this case, it’s different — you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. So, yeah. This is not good, man. Especially in my case, that I knew I didn’t do anything wrong and I was going all through this situation. It was a very bad feeling.

“I feel the truth was found and everybody knows that was a tainted supplement,” dos Santos said. “It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my intention. There’s always negative people, that they keep saying bad things about you. They hold on the negative things. But I feel like I got my reputation back. It’s very, very important to me.”

“Cigano” went into further detail about why his process was so frustrating, focusing on the fact that he had tested positive for extremely low levels of the banned substance, something that should have tipped USADA off to the questionable nature of his failure. Such a trivial amount, he suggested, is too much to hold up a hard-working athlete’s career:

“Based on those numbers, on those things, in my mind USADA would be the organization that know that I’m not a cheater,” dos Santos said. “But it wasn’t like that. I still went through this whole investigation, this whole scenario and they were putting me as a cheater. It was very bad, man. Now, I hope they can keep a clean sport however they can do that. But they have better rules, better ways to treat the athletes. Because it’s our lives. I hope the system gets better.”

Overall, though, dos Santos still supports USADA because he wants the UFC to feature clean champs:

“I know this sport, these drugs, these performance-enhancing drugs are a big problem for all the athletes. Because everybody knows most of the athletes, in general, in other sports, too, sometimes they take PEDs. I want to see a clean sport, because we want to know who is the real champion. We don’t want to see a fake champion over there.”

While he may be in favor of a clean sport, he reiterated that proving his innocence made his life a nightmare for the last year, and the ordeal saddened him. “Cigano” chose to affirm that he became champion the right way, and wants to yet again:

“This last year was a nightmare for me, because man, I never imagine I could go through something like that in my career,” dos Santos said. “I’ve been playing the fair game my entire career. I became the champion of the world like that and my goal is to become champion of the world again this way. This thing that happened with me and USADA, that was very sad for me.”