Heading into this his light heavyweight championship rematch with Anthony “Rumble” Johnson in the main event of this weekend’s (Sat., April 8, 2017) UFC 210 from the KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York, 205-pound titleholder Daniel Cormier knows his legacy will rest on his rivalry with troubled-yet-dominant former champ Jon Jones.
Cormier recently admitted as much, and Johnson, the man he submitted to win the belt at UFC 187 in 2015, had a similar stance when he and Cormier appeared on ESPN’s “5ive Rounds’ Podcast earlier this week (via MMA Fighting), believing Jones to “always be around, regardless of what happened.”
That was where Cormier drew the line, however, noting that the fact he failed a drug test only three days before their scheduled rematch at last year’s UFC 200 should not be overlooked just because of how transcendent he was as a fighter:
“You kind of expect it, but there’s only one problem with Anthony’s answer,” Cormier said. “I think we’ve got to stop saying, ‘Regardless of what happened.’ We know what happened. We know exactly what he did. So when we say stuff like, ‘Regardless of what happened,’ or we don’t state the facts, it’s almost like we’re sweeping it under the rug. We know what he did. We know the bad things that he did. We know that he tried to cheat. We know all this stuff. So I get annoyed because I’m like, ‘Why are you asking me about a guy that, three days before we were supposed to fight, pissed hot?’ That’s the stuff that annoys me, not the fact that he’s a good fighter. He’s a great fighter.”
Jones unceremoniously tested positive for banned estrogen blockers heading into his anticipated second fight with Cormier, and the former champion and his team went on to defend their case by claiming sexual performance enhancement drugs were the culprit. There’s a large view that USADA accepted Jones’ defense following an arbitration hearing, but Cormier wanted to clear the air by detailing USADA did not accept his argument, which lead to the full one-year suspension as a sanction:
“He got that year [suspension] from USADA, right?” Cormier said. “He got a year suspension and there’s this misconception that USADA believed his excuse. They did not believe his excuse. They gave him the max amount of time that they could for what he did! The defense that he had didn’t prove anything. USADA gave him the max suspension that they could give him so, to me, he’s a cheater. They didn’t buy that whole — what was it, a fertility pill, or a sex pill? They didn’t buy it because if they bought the explanation, they would not have given him the max amount of time that they could have.”
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