Reigning UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev defeated current 145-pound titleholder Alexander Volkanovski in their five-round “champ champ” fight atop the UFC 284 pay-per-view (PPV) card last weekend in Perth, Western Australia.
Shortly after the curtain dropped “Down Under,” UFC lightweight Dan Hooker, a friend and teammate of “The Great” featherweight, accused Makhachev of rehydrating with an intravenous line (IV) to help rebound from a “killer weight cut.”
Former UFC title challenger and self-confessed gamer, Chael Sonnen, is not convinced the mystery nurse called into question — and later debunked by Team Makhachev — actually exists, because it would put the Dagestani grappler in a somewhat precarious position.
“Hooker is maintaining he has been told by a medical professional, in this case a nurse, that the nurse administered an IV to Islam after the weigh ins and prior to the fight,” Sonnen told his YouTube subscribers. “If Islam was to have gotten an IV — and that’s a big if, because where’d they do it? Did they put it in this arm? Did they come over the top of [his] hand? It’s a really big one, because people will simply look at you. Islam was on television the next day, it was called ‘the fight.’ We can stop any one of those stills and we could zoom in and he’s either got a mark there or he doesn’t. Real straightforward.”
“If we then had a medical professional, in this case, a nurse, who was coming out and saying, ‘I did it and I will sign here under this sworn testimony’ … in America, we take their license away, quickly,” Sonnen continued. “That would be a HIPAA violation, it would be beyond inappropriate if a nurse did that. In Australia? I don’t know. I would probably think the same thing. If I was to guess, that did not happen. And you’re talking to a cheater, guys. But I brought my own IV. I wasn’t gonna go to a hospital. I wasn’t going to go check in. And I wasn’t going to bring somebody to my room that later could have a Twitter handle and wants to get in the good graces of Dan Hooker and company. So I brought my own guy so nobody every asked me any questions.”
“You’re telling me that a nurse walked into that room, went over to the closet and got out a coat hanger, hung it on the top of the door, as we cheated the guy in the main event in the biggest fight in the history of Perth,” Sonnen concluded. “It’s a lot to believe. It’s a lot to accept. I feel very confident in telling you, said nurse is never going to come out. I also feel confident in telling you that whoever got this information to Dan Hooker — and Dan Hooker believes it to be true — whoever got this information to Dan Hooker is a nut rider trying to gain favor, that’s what I think.”
There’s not much evidence that Makhachev used an IV, which is currently banned under the rules of United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), outside of Hooker’s accusations. Perhaps it’s a sneaky way for “The Hangman” to help expedite this request.
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