Robbie Lawler fires back at Rory MacDonald after steroid accusations

Back in July of 2015, in the co-main event of UFC 189, Robbie Lawler and Rory MacDonald engaged in perhaps the greatest fight of all time. While MacDonald very nearly won this fight with a fourth-round salvo, a ferocious Lawler surged back in the fifth to capture a TKO victory.

While this fight will never be forgotten on the basis of its absolutely thrilling nature, it has recently been re-entering the headlines thanks to some serious accusations from MacDonald, who has repeatedly shared his belief that Lawler might have been abusing performance enhancing drugs at the time of the fight. The most recent of these accusations from MacDonald occured during an AMA on Reddit.

“Do you think Robbie Lawler was on peds when you fought?” MacDonald was asked by a fan.

“I’m convinced he was,” he responded. 

Now, Lawler has responded to MacDonald. Speaking on The TSN MMA Show, the former welterweight champion explained that he believes MacDonald is simply looking for a way to cope with his ultra-violent UFC 189 loss.

“I think he’s trying to figure out why things happened the way they happened and he’s finding a different way to cope with it,” he said of these accusations. 

Lawler then responded to MacDonald’s main argument: that Lawler never slowed down or lost power over the course of their five-round bloodletting.

“I mean, I was getting hurt, I got stung by a head kick and he cut my lip with an elbow, but all you have in the end is your will to fight,” Lawler said in response to MacDonald’s argument. 

Since his fight with MacDonald, Lawler defeated Carlos Condit, lost to Tyron Woodley, and most recently, rebounded with a recent defeat of Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone. MacDonald, meanwhile, followed his loss to Lawler with a loss to Stephen Thompson, and then migrated to the Bellator cage where he defeated Paul Daley in his debut.

Where do you stand on this back-and-forth between Rory MacDonald and Robbie Lawler?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 10/24/2017.