Jone's 'B' sample was positive as well (surprise!). The result of the Cormier fight was changed to NC and Cormier was restored to UFC LHW champion. Scuttlebutt is Jones will contest the result on the basis that the blood taken at the same time as the urine that was positive, plus an additional urine sample taken later, all were negative. This was an old school AAS (think: Jan Ullrich and GDR cycling) with a detectable period of 60 days. I can't envision this defence getting any traction since it puts USADA in the position of having to defend the validity of negative results, and as we saw with the FLandis case, the testing process is fair unassailable. Plus, the apparent discrepancies might be the result of Jones' failure to strictly adhere to the adulterant/masking protocols.
On the one hand I find this a terrible sports tragedy (think: Mike Tyson meets Don King) because Jones obviously is a phenom and a very rare talent. He's a heavyweight above the waist, a budgie below the waist, has the wingspan of an Andean condor, has cardio for days, and he invents positively mental but crazy-effective techniques on the fly.
But on the other hand, it's pretty clear from the drama that swirls around his private life that he has a tendency to self-destruction.
I don't doubt that UFC is awash in PEDs but there's no one else in the sport right now who can match Jones' cornucopia of suspicious circumstances. His T/E ratio consistently is inhumanly low, <1:1, which Victor Conte remarked two years ago merited investigating to discover the cause of. There was the incident when multiple witnesses confirmed that Jones hid under the cage at his gym when the USADA men showed up unannounced. And when they pulled up a chair and waited all day for Jones' "return," Jones stayed in hiding, even peeing himself rather than give himself up. So he dodged charges of evading a test, which carries the same penalty as failing it.
Then there was the cocaine positive he skated on because WADA later claimed the control was irregular because they had no charter to test for recreational drugs (after which Jones self-admitted to a residential rehab program ...for one night). And there was marijuana residue on a pipe he left in the car he abandoned after the hit-and-run automobile accident when he ran a stoplight (an incident which saw him stripped of title and temporarily suspended by UFC).
Last year he tested positive for clomiphene and letrozole, both "post-cycle therapy" drugs, PEDs used to jump-start production of natural testosterone at the end of a steroid "cycle." He claimed the positive must have come from contaminated male virility pills, and USADA testing confirmed that the brand of pills he was taking, which were generic forms of the pharmaceutical Cialis, were in fact contaminated with clomiphene and letrozole. USADA reduced his punishment from two years to one on the basis that he was only cheating accidentally, but he still was responsible for everything he put into his body.
An incident which begs the question, how could he have been so certain those pills were the source, unless either, A. He already knew those pills were contaminated with the same drugs he was taking on PCT, or, B. He had hired a lab to test and confirm. And if B., why did he never offer that evidence to USADA, the UFC or the press? And at the risk of sounding the conspiracy anorak, can you not see the increased market potential from adding just enough of these "contaminants" to your product to trigger a positive test, yet in amounts still too minuscule to risk them being labeled "tainted" by the pharma authorities? It would be a veritable get-out-of-jail-free card for any doped athlete needing to cycle off the 'roids before a competition. You don't buy them to take them, you buy them to claim you took them if/when you get popped. I don't think anyone ever endeavoured to prove he had taken the pills, the punishment was mitigated based entirely on his claim that he had taken them.
And now this. How could he not take every possible precaution to assure coming up clean on this, his return fight coming off a one-year PEDs suspension? I think you have to conclude that Jones believes himself teflon-coated, that the rules are for other people, both outside the ring and in, e.g., the eye-poking, the questionable knee kicks, and not to forget he once was DQed for illegal elbows. He is known not to play well with others, and he runs with scissors. I hope they come down hard on him for this because I think from this point forward, the sport is better off without him.
If he's 280 vs JJ at 230...whsu, JJ is good, but 50 lbs is a lot to give up, and that's assuming that JJ even gets to 230. I guess we'll have to wait and see how the USADA stuff goes...
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