Former UFC heavyweight champion and current WWE superstar Brock Lesnar received a one-year suspension earlier today by the Nevada Athletic Commission due to two failed drug tests for his fight with Mark Hunt at UFC 200 this past July.
Lesnar also agreed to pay a fine of $250,000 in a settlement, which equals to 10% of his disclosed $2.5 million purse for the fight. His unanimous decision victory over Hunt has been officially overturned into a no contest.
Lesnar’s fight with Hunt was a one-off, allowed by stipulations in his WWE contract and Vince McMahon giving the ok. Lesnar will be 40 years old when he is eligible to return to MMA competition in July 2017.
Now that I got the facts out-of-the-way, I’m going to tell it like it is. Brock Lesnar vs. Mark Hunt at UFC 200 was a mirage, a sham, and should be erased from the history books altogether.
Brock Lesnar helped that card pick up some serious steam after Conor McGregor announced his “retirement.” There are a lot of people who booked a flight to Las Vegas, bought a ticket to the event, and purchased the show on pay-per-view simply because Lesnar was on the marquee.
Not only did we find out, after the fact, that Lesnar cheated, but that he is no longer declared the winner. This reeks of stupidity on Lesnar’s part since he knew he was returning to a vastly different UFC, in terms of drug testing policy and procedure, then he left five years ago.
What happened to “We’re going to get to the bottom of this” from Lesnar? What about the eye medication and foot cream that Lesnar’s attorney claimed was the cause of the test failure?
I’ll tell you what happened. The UFC’s plan of exempting Lesnar from USADA’s mandatory four-month testing protocol before his return to the octagon was foiled to the nth degree.
In the end, should anyone be surprised by all of this? No, not really. Still, it stinks when MMA gets bogged down by the ill-gotten gains of one of the sport’s most popular figures.
Ringside Logic 