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Former Strikeforce women’s featherweight champion Cristiane ‘Cyborg’ Santos had the results of her last win this past December changed to a “No Contest” after testing positive for steroids. Since then, she has been stripped of her title, fined $2,500 and was slapped with a one year suspension.
Santos has now come out with this steroid awareness video, offering her thoughts on the incident, admitting that she made a mistake but denies that she intended to cheat.
“I do not condone the use of steroids as an athlete and I think it is a horrible thing. I made a mistake in trusting someone in my camp and it has cost me my belt and made me look like a cheater. I am not a cheater. I have passed every drug test and never used steroids knowingly. I passed the drug test the night I beat Gina Carano to become the Strikeforce Champion.”
“People Talk, say the only way I have gotten to where I am now is the use of drugs. They say I am a cheater. That’s not true. I just made th emistake of taking something that was supposed to help me lose weight. I did not know it was a steroid. Everything I take and put in my body is my responsibility. I take responsibility for the results and have publicly apologized to Hiroki, Strikeforce the CSAC and my fans.”
“I have eliminated certain people from my training camp. I am taking monthly drug tests at the same laboratory that the CSAC uses to show I do not take steroids. And I am publicly acknowledging my responsibility and want to educate other fighters and the general public on the dangers of steroid use.”
“Everything you use, you need to first ask a Dr., if it’s good for your health and good for your body, before you actually put it in your body.”
“I believe that everything I did in MMA, can be deleted by one mistake. I believe I made a mistake and now is the time to press through the problem and work to make sure it never happens again. If people have the wrong vision that steroids is going to help with the fight give you more strength, give you more aggressiveness. This is not true. You have aggressiveness, you are born with that.”
“You can’t take steroids and think that will help you. You need to train hard, you need to do a lot of training, conditioning, to get stronger and this is your own thing, steroids is not going to help take short cut through that, you need to train for that.”
“I want to say to my fans, I’m still training, I’m never going to stop. Everything I did for MMA is not going to stop here. I will be back, I’m training hard, I”m going to still fight with all the aggressiveness I show, I’m going to fight hard, looking for the knockout all the time and the next fight will be shocking.”