For all his past drug test dilemmas — and yes, there have been a few — Nick Diaz has always stayed vocally consistent on his strict anti-PED stance. So it goes without saying that when Diaz returns from his near two-year hiatus to fight Anderson Silva at UFC 183, he’ll be pleased to do so in a climate that is far more stringent than the one he left in March 2013.
“I like that, it’s good,” Diaz recently said of the UFC’s increased drug testing efforts on The MMA Hour.
“I think at this point a lot of people aren’t into it. Most fighters for the most part, they like to do steroids. So that’s too bad for them.”
A wave of drug testing failures have come to light over the past calendar year as UFC officials continue to beef up their drug testing program, including six alone within the past several months: Ali Bagautinov, Piotr Hallmann, Brian Ortega, Mike King, Kevin Casey, and Robert Drysdale.
Diaz himself failed drug tests in Nevada in both 2007 and 2012, the former of which negated a stunning win over then-Pride FC champion Takenori Gomi, the latter of which followed Diaz’s controversial loss to Carlos Condit. Nonetheless the cause for each of those failed tests was marijuana metabolites, rather than any sort of PED, and Diaz supports the UFC’s efforts to institute year-round random testing in 2015.
“I look at it like there’s ups and downs for fighters who are doing a lot of steroids, and you know, I look at my career like a long-term (thing),” Diaz said.
“Martial arts, when I do martial arts, it’s more of a life type of training. I do martial arts for myself in general, so I’m not trying to go there with needing extra help and doing all of that. I just try to be as healthy as I can, pretty much. It’s not my thing really to be on steroids, so you have different types of fighters, I guess you could say. Different types of athletes. I think stylistically though, these guys who take steroids, they’re a just different crew a lot of times.”