Midnight Mania! MMA Manager Says He Knows ‘At Least 5’ On EPO

Bringing you the weird and wild from the world of MMA each and every weeknight Welcome to Midnight Mania!
Whenever an athlete fails for Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), one of the first questions is always, who knew? Did their coach kno…

Bringing you the weird and wild from the world of MMA each and every weeknight

Welcome to Midnight Mania!

Whenever an athlete fails for Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), one of the first questions is always, who knew? Did their coach know? What about their teammates? Their strength and conditioning coach? What about their manager?

MMA manager Ali Abdelaziz, who manages such fighters as Kamaru Usman, Cody Garbrandt, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and Frankie Edgar, is getting ahead of these questions. He says he knows at least 5 people who are on EPO. Are they his clients, one wonders?

TJ going through what he’s going through. He’s already dealing with a lot of problems. But @Cody_Nolove those 2 losses should be no contests. Usada doing a horrible job testing guys for EPO, I know at least 5 ppl who are on it

He is referring, of course, to TJ Dillashaw’s positive test for EPO, and the revelation in the aftermath that USADA doesn’t test for EPO as part of their standard routine; it requires a special test that they do not always run. They retested a sample from before the Cejudo fight that also came back positive for the substance. This raised the question, if a retroactive test came back positive for the period prior to, say, a fight with Cody Garbrandt, should that result be overturned? We know how Garbrandt’s manager would vote.

While we are talking about the figures surrounding fighters who might have knowledge of their EPO habits, this statement from Dillashaw’s strength and conditioning coach is remarkable. It must be read to be believed.

Suffice it to say that when you start out a sentence “As a man of few words”, and the rest of that sentence is “preferring passion and belief as a shield to be carried out upon, I am bemused to careless and reckless dialog for no other purpose than to make myself heard among the masses plagued by willful ignorance”, you already lost credibility.

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Sleep well, Maniacs! A better tomorrow is always possible. Follow me on Twitter and Facebook @Vorpality