On July 29th, a well placed head kick landed Jon Jones back in the top spot as the UFC’s Light Heavyweight champion. Jon Jones has been hard at work repairing his tarnished image and upon re-securing the UFC’s Light Heavyweight belt, things were really looking up for one of MMA’s brightest stars. Less than a month later, all that he worked for is in jeopardy with yet another failed drug test and potential Anti-Doping Policy violation.
Those that have followed John Jones’ troubled saga know that back in July of last year, Jones was popped for a Anti-Doping Policy violation days before meeting Daniel Cormier in the octagon at UFC 200. The fight was canceled and Jones was ultimately suspended for one year. Jones blamed a tainted sexual enhancement pill for his positive tests of the banned substances clomiphene and letrozole. Yet, here we are a year later revisiting the same issue.
When I heard the news I quickly took to Google to see what Daniel Cormier had to say abut this. He didn’t immediately comment (publicly) however he did speak yesterday and he had this to say:
“It’s hard to find words to describe how I’m feeling right now. I’m disappointed to hear the news. It’s very emotional. We as athletes are entitled to due process, and I will refrain from saying much more until I know exactly what happened. In my mind, on July 29, I competed and I lost. I thought Jon Jones was the better man that day. I don’t know what to think anymore. I can’t believe we are going through all of this again. We will see what happens next. Thank you to all my fans who have supported me during this dark time. I love you all very much.”
Now that’s a classy statement from someone who held the UFC belt with honor. The fact that some people still boo Daniel Cormier is hard for me to wrap my head around, but that’s for another article, I suppose.
Team Jon Jones was also in shock as they scrambled to understand how this happened after Jones passed two random tests on July 6th and July 7th only to fail the scheduled test a few days later. Malki Kawa, Jon Jones’ manager made this statement (as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting):
“I can almost bet my life on it that this is another tainted supplement. You’ve got to just take a look at the testing and how this thing went down. Jon passed two (random, out-of-competition) tests, July 6th and July 7th, … and in passing those two tests, they test for all of that stuff we failed for. So therefore, you’re talking about from the day he passed that test until the day before the fight, he would’ve had to have ingested something that would’ve caused this test to come out positive.
The problem that we’re having with that is that he passes all of the random tests, but then the one test that we know about, the one that we for sure know about, is the one that we fail? So, something here is not sitting right. I’m assuming it’s the supplements we took. We just obviously got to get to work on it, see what was taken that month, that three-week period, that week of the fight, and figure it out from there.”
Regardless of how this ends up, Anti-Doping violations are among the most serious types of violations in the sport of MMA. This is not the first time Jon Jones has been caught up in a controversy of this kind and it has a lot of his fans (myself included) wondering about the legitimacy of his greatness.
Only time will tell how this whole thing shakes out, but this is bad for Jon Jones. Real bad. It’s also bad for the sport of Mixed Martial Arts. Real bad.
Andy Gonzalez is a coach at Aces Jiu Jitsu Club. He has earned his BJJ Brown Belt under 2nd Degree Black Belt, Professor Mikal Abdullah. Follow Andy on Twitter at @GoGoGonzilla
Andy lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Amanda and their 3 beautiful children. Andy is also the father of a Marine who is honorably serving in the United States Marine Corps.