It’s widely understood that in order to compete at the highest level in any sport, athletes must be supremely disciplined and make sacrifices in their personal lives to be able to perform at their best.
For professional MMA fighters, it goes without saying that staying up late partying, drinking alcohol, and taking recreational drugs are things to avoid, especially in the build-up to a fight, but for some, it seems the temptation is too strong to resist.
In this article we’ll look at the lives of 10 MMA stars who became so seduced by the party lifestyle that even the daunting prospect of an upcoming fight looming large on the horizon wasn’t enough to stop them from succumbing to their base instincts, and furthermore show how this rarely lead to a happy ending in the long run.
Jon Jones
As the UFC’s light heavyweight champion and one of the sport’s all-time greats, Jon Jones appeared to have the world at his feet, but that wasn’t enough for the self-destructive star.
Though he’d had minor issues in the past, alarm bells started ringing loudly in early 2015 when Jones tested positive for cocaine just weeks prior to his UFC 182 title defense against Daniel Cormier.
His various run-ins with both the law and USADA since are well documented, but in an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Jones gave further insight into just how out-of-control his behavior had been over the years.
“I had this crazy thing that I would do where I would party one week before every fight and I did that throughout my whole career,” Jones confessed to Rogan. “…I would get blacked out wasted.
“My logic was if this guy was to beat me somehow I can look myself in the mirror and say that I lost because I got hammered the week before the fight. It was a safety net. I did it my whole career.”
The 30-year-old Jones was recently stripped of his light heavyweight title for the third time in three years after testing positive for steroids and is now facing another potentially lengthy suspension in the prime of his career.
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