There is perhaps no fighter in MMA who has undergone quite as many physical and emotional transformations as Vitor Belfort.
By the time he gets his shot at Chris Weidman’s middleweight championship on Saturday at UFC 187, I’m not sure anyone quite knows which version of Belfort is going to show up.
We know only that the 38-year-old Brazilian has waited a long time for this. There have been a year’s worth of false starts and unexpected detours leading up to this weekend’s co-main event. In the interim, Belfort has experienced enough turmoil and controversy to last a professional lifetime.
Conventional wisdom says he won’t be the same guy who terrorized the 185-pound division during 2013. We all remember that guy, right? The guy who strung together as impressive a series of headkick knockouts as the sport has ever seen? The guy who fought exclusively in Brazil? The guy who looked like a He Man action figure with Belfort’s head photoshopped on top of it?
Recent visual evidence—including the latest episode of UFC Embedded, released by the fight company on Tuesday—shows that guy is nowhere to be found. These days, Belfort is looking a lot more human. Scenes of him cavorting on the beach with Blackzillians teammate Anthony Johnson have Belfort looking merely like a really, really in-shape, middle-aged man.
For what it’s worth, oddsmakers don’t particularly like that guy’s chances.
Belfort is currently going off as something like a 3-1 underdog to Weidman, according to Odds Shark. Maybe that seems strange, considering Belfort is coming off a trio of performances where he nearly decapitated Dan Henderson, Luke Rockhold and Michael Bisping.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this title fight.
A couple of funny things, actually.
Weidman vs. Belfort was originally scheduled to go down at UFC 173 in May 2014, but on February 7 of that year, Belfort tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone during a surprise drug test administered by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Twenty days later, the NSAC voted to suddenly ban the controversial testosterone replacement therapy treatments that had been fueling Belfort since at least mid-2011.
In the wake of that decision—or maybe it was the failed drug test itself—Belfort elected not to apply for a license to fight Weidman, and their bout was postponed. Belfort obtained a conditional license from the NSAC two months later, but a pair of subsequent efforts to get him together with the champ (at UFC 181 and UFC 184) also failed, when Weidman was forced out with injuries.
This lengthy delay has had a couple of interesting ripple effects.
For starters, it’s given us all time to get used to the idea of Weidman as the newly dominant UFC champ. There was a certain amount of dissent at first, when the undefeated New Yorker added career victories Nos. 10 and 11 by taking out Anderson Silva in back-to-back efforts during 2013.
Belfort’s TRT troubles, however, have allowed Weidman to further state his case in a Fight of the Year candidate against Lyoto Machida at UFC 175. While you get the impression he hasn’t blossomed into an enormous pay-per-view draw, at least the people who would argue he doesn’t deserve to be champion must now do so from the relative anonymity of their parents’ basements.
Simultaneously, Belfort has gone from this:
To this:
Perhaps coincidentally, many people now appear to have significantly cooled on the dude’s prospects. At this point, this fight has taken up an odd position in our minds. Since we’ve had such a long time to think about it and have apparently decided Belfort probably won’t win, it has started to seem like merely a stepping stone for Weidman.
We want to see him put it behind him so he can get on with the business of taking on arguably more interesting challengers like Rockhold, Jacare Souza and Yoel Romero.
After all, the blueprint on how to beat the non-testosterone infused version of Belfort has been a matter of public record since Randy Couture first did it at UFC 15, and it’s a game plan that Weidman seems fully capable of implementing. Just weather the storm of Belfort’s initial flurries, drag him into deep water and wait for his energy reserves to run dry.
It worked for Couture. It worked for Tito Ortiz. It worked for most of the people who beat him during the heart of his career.
Ironically, Belfort will take the cage on Saturday just a week after the NSAC once again moved to significantly stiffen its own anti-drug policies. These days, a positive test for elevated levels of testosterone could (at least in theory) net an athlete a three-year ban and a hefty fine for a first offense.
In Belfort’s case, another positive test in Nevada would be his third—he also tested positive for steroids in 2006—and could theoretically result in a lifetime ban, though, it remains to be seen how the NSAC’s new regulations actually play out in practice.
In any case, we have it on a good authority that Belfort has been tested multiple times leading up to this bout and that he passed, per MMAFighting.com. At the same time, The Phenom is now suddenly back to physically resembling the guy who went 4-6 from 2002-06.
Yet he’s been awfully good the last few years. Since 2007, his only losses are to Silva and Jon Jones. If he comes to the cage and fights like he is still in his prime, this bout could turn out to be much closer than the odds indicate.
It all depends on which version of Belfort shows up to fight, and we won’t know that until the first punches are thrown.
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