Chael Sonnen discusses the current state of PED’s in MMA

Chael Sonnen has opened up about the current state of PED’s (Performance Enhancing Drugs) in MMA.

Sonnen, 45, retired from the sport of MMA in June of 2019.

Back in August of 2010 at UFC 117 Sonnen himself tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs following his loss to Anderson Silva. At the time it was determined Sonnen had ‘well above normal’ levels of testosterone in his system, deemed to be not a natural substance, but a steroid.

In speaking on his ‘Bad Guy Inc‘ podcast, Sonnen had this to say about PED’s in the MMA:

“The sport is so clean, it really is so clean. It’s not perfect, it’s a game, it’s a game with a flawed phycology by the user of which I used to be one. If it’s not on the banned list, then it’s not banned. There is a technicality to that rule, there really is. If you could get a chemist that could change one strand and create something new of which has not been identified by anybody…. You see where this gets really interesting.”

Continuing Chael Sonnen said:

“So the guys that are using, the guys that are failing the drug tests, they are known but you have to catch them. And there’s a number of things about the agreements that is not the way it’s advertised to you guys, so you need to know:

No. 1 What they’re using

No. 2 How they’re using it

No. 3 When they are using it

Concluding Sonnen, speaking about his own PED incident, said:

“Now when you watch people playing this game and when I went down on this, I got hired by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Hired is because I don’t know a better term to use as it was part of my disciplinary action. But my phone rang a lot and not only did I answer all those calls, I made a bunch of them to a lot of my buddies and I said STOP. They’re coming, they’re going to get you, I know what you were told, I know what you think, it’s better and it’s different – no STOP. They thought that they had it beat.”

“Here’s what influenced me – it wasn’t losing my license, it wasn’t getting suspended. It was Dana White, when asked about baseball and steroids who said, It’s a guy with a stick, this is combat where somebody could hurt or kill somebody by doing something secretly that’s against the rules. That changed me. That was the moment.”

Do you agree with Chael Sonnen’s analogy regarding PED’s in the MMA?