Sonnen: ‘It’s reasonable to assume Anderson was cheating for years’

“As soon as you test positive for something people will want to say it was over your whole career. My response is, ‘That’s fair. That’s a fair statement.’ If you get hit with something it runs you all the way back in time.”

“I don’t think it helps a guy to ever come out and go, ‘No no no. This was a one time … man they caught me on a bad…’ Call it what it is. You took it. You got caught. The end.

“We’ll see how Anderson handles it, but I think when somebody, at least for me, when somebody tried to say things, even when it wasn’t accurate, I think I still deserve it. If you test positive and somebody wants to run that back all the way to when I started my career at nine years old, I don’t think that guy’s wrong.”

“I really don’t know. I can tell you this on Anderson Silva, the human body doesn’t get better with age. That’s reality. We start to decline as humans and particularly as athletes right around 25 years old. If you’re real lucky you might push that to 27 or 28. The good news is science and medicine have come along and decided the world does not belong to 18-25 year-olds, but that you can extend your career beyond that.

“If you’re asking me if he took something… There’s two tests that you take. The first test is not the urine drug test. The first test is the visual. When a guy takes his t-shirt off and gets in the ring or steps on the scale, you look at him. If a guy got better with time, you can’t do that on your own. Anderson Silva’s body doesn’t appear to have changed at all. So, a reasonable person would conclude that whatever he was on now, he was on before. But there’s no evidence to support that.”