Daniel Cormier has responded to his biggest rival.
This week, bombshell news was revealed that the partnership between Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is ending in Jan. 2024. Just when everyone thought the sport would go back to the dark ages, UFC CBO, Hunter Campbell and Senior Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance Jeff Novitzky, addressed the media and explained that a new drug testing agency would be replacing USADA.
One of the most notorious fighters that USADA has throttled, Jon Jones, is pleased that the partnership is no more and tweeted that he survived USADA.
“Man I survived USADA,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “First they said I was guilty of having picograms, then they considered me innocent, next picograms became legal. Guess what I’m still here, still unbeaten. That BS no contest over ‘DC’ needs to be taken off my record. I’ve never cheated this sport, and I will stand by that until the day I die.”
Jones knocked out his longtime rival, Cormier, at UFC 214 in 2017 but tested positive for a turinabol metabolite, which caused the win to be a no-contest. Fifteen months after being reinstated after a suspension, a trace amount of turinabol came up in his drug test before his fight at UFC 232, which made the term ‘picogram’ follow Jones for the rest of his career.
His longtime rival, Cormier, did not take long to respond to Jones via his YouTube channel.
“People will try to rewrite history. You can’t rewrite history,” Cormier said. “Again, you can try to rewrite history, and it’ll be like during baseball, there was the steroid era, and all those guys don’t get to go into the Hall of Fame. Will we look back on 2015 to 2023 as the USADA era? And will these guys that had these things deal with issues going forward in terms of tainting their resume, especially if someone that is middling now becomes an absolute superstar after USADA is gone?”
“We have a short memory as MMA fans,” Cormier continued. “Our memory is super short. But let me say this, you don’t get to rewrite history. You don’t get to say — well, first off, I don’t believe that it’s all true. This is one of the reasons Jones and I could never just truly come to a common ground because sometimes you just say whatever you want…You can just say whatever you want; doesn’t always have to be true.”
Jones will definitely have something to say to Cormier before he defends his Heavyweight championship against Stipe Miocic next month at UFC 295.