Chael Sonnen fails another piss test

Chael Sonnen got pulled from UFC 175 because he pissed hot in a random drug test.  It gets funny, here.  Chael's initial opponent, Wanderlei Silva, was pulled from the event because he left town rather than give a piss test - and then Chael publicly mocked Silva's flight, calling him a cheating drug user.  Funny stuff.

It comes from comedy into farce because this isn't the first time Sonnen has failed a drug test.  After Sonnen's first loss to Anderson Silva, Sonnen was popped in a drug test and suspended by the California State Athletic Commission.  The hearings were a riot as Sonnen claimed to have never gone through puberty, you had the quack doctor, crocodile tears, you name it - it was like a soap opera.

The big lie he told, though, was that he told the Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was using testosterone replacement.  He never told them that - or at least he was never able to produce any documents saying he did, and the then director of the NSAC testified that Sonnen has never gotten any medical use exemptions for testosterone replacement.

Around the same time, he got a suspended sentence for real estate fraud - he was taking kickbacks.  The guy is a real charmer.  A real honest character.

In a spiral of weirdness, UFC president Dana White condemned both Sonnen and the NSAC.  Sonnen for breaking the rules but the majority of his hectoring was over the NSAC providing no guidelines for athletes coming off of testosterone replacement that had been approved in previous years.

I'm sure that one baffles the NSAC because there is a standard in place for that kind of thing - you don't apply for a license to fight until you're clean.  Lots of people use lots of drugs that are forbidden in the context of an athletic contest.  Painkillers given to soothe an injury are illegal to use in competition - so you don't apply to fight until that stuff is out of your system.  AND you report your use of it to the commission when the time comes, which Sonnen also failed to do.

Unlike many other athletes who are two time drug cheats, Sonnen will not be fired from the UFC.  Dana White likes the guy too much, and he's a big draw, as well.  Somehow, after losing a title shot to Anderson Silva - again - he managed to talk his way into a championship fight at higher weight class!  Dana White said he was sending a message to the people who said they needed a full training camp to fight Jon Jones, the best mixed martial artist now fighting . . . even though Dan Henderson, who was a legitimate contender, was trying to book the fight.

Chael Sonnen is a real life lesson, though.  The message is clear - if you're a good-looking white Republican man, you can lie, cheat and steal and be rewarded for it.

Steroid use vs. weight cutting - let's talk hypocrisy

Today, MMAJunkie.com's Ben Fowlkes said that we have to make up our mind about steroids in MMA.  In the question about steroids, for me there's an interesting artifact that already exists inside MMA - and all combat sports that are divided into weight classes - and that's weight cutting.

The problem people have with steroids, I find, is often vague.  It's cheating.  In the sense of the term that there are rules against steroids, this is absolutely true, of course.  But let us be clear, in most jurisdictions, cutting weight is illegal.  Let's look at New Jersey, for instance!  Here's what New Jersey law says about weight cutting from the New Jersey Administrative Code 13:46-1A.3 Weighing of Boxers (which also applies to MMA as per the NJAC):

(a) Weighing of all boxers for all shows must take place not later than one o'clock on the day of the show in which said boxers are to take part.
(b) Weights must be determined by a representative of the Commissioner with the matchmaker concerned present.
(c) Opponents should be weighed in the presence of each other.
(d) Members of the press, in addition to the responsible handlers of the boxers, shall be permitted to attend the weighing of principals.
(e) All weights stripped.
(f) No boxer shall be permitted to lose more than one percent of his body weight on the day of the boxing contest in an attempt to make the weight required by his boxing contract and by N.J.A.C. 13:46-1A.3.

To me, this is pretty clear.  There are no provisions in the law for doing weight cuts on any day other than the fight, the law clearly expects weigh-ins to be on the day of the fight, though they can't be later than 1pm, and fighters have a one percent leeway.  I suspect, in practice, is that if your weight at the fight is more than one percent over the maximum weight of the class, you'd be cheating.

Regardless, in New Jersey law, weight cutting is illegal.  It's clearly, definitely and I think unambiguously cheating.  And, yet, in no MMA contest I've seen held in New Jersey has this law been followed.  Weight cutting, by which I mean cheating, is absolutely ubitquitous in MMA and boxing, everyone knows it and no one is doing anything about it.

Weight cutting is also dangerous.  People die from it.  And even when they don't die, it's brutal on your body.  It saps them of health and vigor - of strength and endurance - right before a rigorous athletic contest.

How is this permitted?  Why do we ignore this one rule that is easy to enforce and good for the fighters while freaking the fuck out whenever anyone's testosterone ratios are out of whack?

The only defense is . . . everyone does it.  Everyone does this unhealthy thing to cheat, so it's okay.  This is so legally and morally vapid that it doesn't deserve comment.

But we have a problem with steroids.  I think that all this fuss about steroid is looking for a speck in your neighbor's eye while ignoring the plank in your own.

Let's talk steroids!

I'm starting to wind myself up for the Georges St-Pierre vs. Josh Koscheck fight on December 11 and I was doing some background reading. Apparently, BJ Penn opined to Koscheck that GSP uses steroids.

It was not explained how a guy who lives in Hawaii knows what a guy who lives in Quebec does or does not take and, really, the whole exchange sounded like sour grapes. Both Penn and Koscheck have lost to St-Pierre. Penn, twice. However, the truth is, it's quite possible that St-Pierre roids up . . . though the same can be said of Penn and Koscheck. A lot of professional athletes hit the steroids.

It makes sense, of course. Someone comes to a pro athlete and says that, for a couple of grand a year, tops, they can make that athlete stronger, faster and with better endurance, that they can roll back the clock and return to an aging athlete the physical prowess of their youth, that athlete is going to seriously consider steroids. After all, the pressure to perform is intense. The crowds want to see people doing things that we have no chance of doing. We want to see feats of strength, speed and endurance more fit for superheroes than mortals. The people who can deliver that kind of performance stand to make a lot of money as well as gain ridiculous praise for it . . . if they can only keep their steroid habits secret.

For my part, I don't much care if athletes take steroids. Go ahead, guys! Gear up! But the arguments against steroids, and other "performance enhancing drugs", are two-fold. The first is, it's "cheating". The second is, it's not healthy. Both arguments are bullshit.

If you follow the Olympics, you will find that the US does very, very well in sports, which is weird because our population is in the worst shape in the world. Americans are, as a group, fatter than people anywhere else -- yet we excel in sports? While the US is out of shape, we are a very rich country. So our best athletes get the best training. We have large, well-funded gyms with all the best equipment, staffed by sports nutritionists and sports doctors and kinethesiologists. Whereas in countries that have much fitter, but poorer, populations, they lack this. So, the US does better than virtually any other country on earth because we happen to be rich (and this is true of virtually any rich country, of course). While this is not technically cheating, it's definitely not fair. It isn't cheating only because the rules don't give a damn about fair.

(Not to mention that almost all Olympic sports are European sports. The athletic games of other cultures are notoriously poorly represented in the Olympics. There are a few token events like judo, but almost all of the events are sports with cultural significance only to "the West". How is that fair? To make Asians and Africans play our sports? That's not cheating, either. That's "fair".)

My point is the idea that athletic competitions are even and fair is foolish. Rich countries can, and do, simply buy events through the mechanism of providing their athletes with kinds of training, diet, medical care and conditioning poor countries cannot.

In this environment, the objection to steroids becomes that, with them, even people in poor countries would do as well as people in rich countries. They are so powerful and so cheap that all other training aids become far, far less significant. You don't really need a really careful diet if you're roided up -- your body will roll those calories over into muscle all by itself in the normal course of exercise.

Indeed, the injunction against steroids was initially anti-communist. Communist nations were roiding up their athletes before it was against the rules of competition to do it, which gave the communist nations huge boosts, obviously. Inventing the argument that steroids weren't "fair" -- when in truth the problem is they were communist -- Western nations, lead by the US, were able to make steroids against international competition rules. This isn't hypothetical. Anti-steroid rules were put in place because the people who control the international athletic bodies are overwhelmingly anti-communist. (This history of drug regulation is chock full of this kind of thing; the earliest anti-drug laws in the US were really anti-Chinese laws, and the earliest anti-marijuana laws were really anti-Mexican laws. It's crazy.)

So I just can't buy the fairness argument. If we were really interested in fair athletics competitions, we'd work to insure that training was standardized. You see something like this in car races. Nowadays, car races aren't about testing technology but testing the drivers, the cars are very standardized, nearly mechanically identical. You could do the same thing with all training for all sports but no one even mentions this kind of possibility, at least not in America which, of course, greatly benefits from the current rules environment.

The fallback argument against steroids then becomes health. This is, if anything, an even more idiotic argument.

Without doubts, steroids have side-effects. Some of them, like "roid rage", seem to have little basis in fact. It is true oral steroids can damage the liver, but the onset of symptoms is clear and easily reversed by discontinuing the drugs and generally the result of incredible overuse. Massive overuse of steroids causes damage to a valve of the heart, but that's also correctable and only shows up in massive doses. There are also lesser effects, like oily skin and temporary bitch tits.

A steroid program also throws your body's hormonal homeostatis out of whack for a while after you discontinue use. Your body recovers in a couple of weeks and the biggest "threat" of this is losing the gains you made under steroids.

(Women face other problems with steroids, such as "virilization", stuff like growing beards and permanent enlargement of the clitoris and require special care in use. This is where the "gender tests" idea for female athletes came from; early female steroid users, many of them East German, had various virilization effects.)

On the other hand, steroids also have many, many benefits. Steroids improve a person's immune system. They promote, kind of obviously, the development of lean muscle mass. They improve red blood cell count, increasing oxygenation of the blood and promoting greater endurance. They improve flexibility and help with healing injuries. They also increase a man's libido and might help with clarity of thought. I'm not making this stuff up! All of these properties are present in even very moderate doses.

Oh, and to retouch the "cheating" issue -- using steroids is hard. Because your body is thrown into hormonal imbalance when you use them, when you stop using them it takes a while for your body to regain homeostasis. So it's really easy to lose all the gains you made while on steroids if you're not deeply committed to exercise. You generally have to work out harder after a steroid program than during it, especially during that time when your body is readjusting to hormonal homeostasis.

Which means, medically, it's not possible to say "steroids are uniformly bad". They have side effects, yeah, and some of them are unpleasant and a couple are actually dangerous (though they present only in massive use). But when you look at the list of positive effects it's hard, I think, to just dismiss steroids as bad for a person's health.

This is crazier because many high-level competitions are also awful for your health. How many football players have knees that resemble jigsaw puzzles? What about skiiers? Boxing, as a sport, is entirely about getting punched, usually to the head. Those guys face such happy conditions as detached retinas, skull fractures, brain swelling, broken knuckles, etc. Yet, despite the various physical damage that they do to themselves that regular people don't do, they're generally in much, much better shape than we are. That a training technique carries with it some (extremely manageable) risk is simply irrelevant considering what athletes already do to themselves.

So, does Georges St-Pierre use steroids? I dunno. Looking at the guy, I can't dismiss the possibility. He looks really good and he looks that way all the time. On the other hand, he's also famous for his work ethic. After getting his head punched off by Matt Serra, he was back in the gym after two days. In interviews, he has made it clear he views himself as a martial artist and not a fighter, the distinction being that he's always in training, looking for ways to improve the art. But, man, he does look ripped, like, all the time. Given his job, you can't automatically reject the idea. (Just like I can't reject it for Josh Koscheck or BJ Penn. It's their job, too.)

What I do know is I'm looking forward to GSP knocking the shit out of Koscheck. I hope Georges St-Pierre pounds a hole in Koscheck's skull. I want a bloody finishing move or at least a rag doll knockout like the one GSP did to Matt Hughes when GSP Cro-kicked his head off. Just sayin'.