The baddest woman on the planet, the day before her most devastating career win, tested positive for anabolic steroids according to a release sent out on 1/6 by the California State Athletic Commission.
Cristiane Justino Santos, 26, the Strikeforce women’s featherweight champion, better known as Cris Cyborg (11-1), tested positive for the anabolic steroid Stanazolol, also known as Winstrol. The test took place on 12/16, the day before knocking out the top contender for the title, Japan’s Hiroko Yamanaka, in 16 seconds.
But the repercussions of this are much deeper than any steroid test failure.
Besides the one year suspension, as well as a $2,500 fine implemented by the commission, Dana White announced that Santos has been stripped of her championship and that Strikeforce was going to do away with the featherweight championship. White said they were only keeping the championship at 145 pounds because of her, because of a lack of talent in the division, and would bring in opponents to face her. At this point they are going to have all the women under contract fight at 135 pounds.
A byproduct of this is it is a major blow to the potential of another women’s superfight like Cyborg vs. Gina Carano in 2009. In an attempt to market Ronda Rousey, the ultimate goal was a Rousey vs. Cyborg fight once Rousey had gotten a year or so worth of exposure as well as another year of ring time. The loss of Cyborg means the ultimate big women’s fight of this time period is Rousey vs. Miesha Tate for the bantamweight title, scheduled for 3/3 in Columbus, OH, and that match is nowhere near as marketable as a prospective Rousey vs. Cyborg match a year from now would have been.
Santos released a statement on Saturday, apologetic, saying she took a dietary aid because she was having trouble getting her weight down to the 145 pound featherweight limit.
“I am ultimately responsible for everything I put in my body, and at the end of the day, there is no excuse for having a prohibited substance in my system,” she wrote. “I do not condone the use of any performance enhancing drugs by myself or any other professional athlete, and willingly accept the penalties and fines that have been handed down to me by the California State Athletic Commission and those of the Strikeforce/Zuffa organization.”
In a radio interview on the MMA Insiders radio show in Las Vegas on Friday, White also gave the indication that the entire women’s featherweight division was likely to be dropped.
“We were going to hold that division and just do fights with Cyborg whenever there was a new contender,” said White on the show. “She’s getting stripped of the belt. This pretty much kills the division.”
Aside from Santos, the top female fighters under contract to Strikeforce, bantamweight champion Tate, former champion Sarah Kaufman and former Olympic judoka Rousey are all now competing at 135 pounds. Rousey, who competed in the Olympics at 154 pounds, winning a bronze medal in 2008, had fought at 145, but was dropping to 135 as a tactical move for a company desired fight with Tate for the championship. The ultimate goal was to set up a champion vs. champion potential showdown with Santos, considered the premiere woman fighter in the world.
However, should Gina Carano, still the most popular name in in women’s MMA return, it could bring the division back. Carano (7-1) hasn’t competed in nearly two-and-a-half years, but was scheduled to fight at one point this past summer until a medical condition forced the fight’s cancellation. Carano, 29, competes at 145 pounds, and her lone career loss was to Santos. She has struggled in the past with making weight, particularly when there have been attempts to get her to fight at a weight less than 145.
“While I was preparing myself for my last fight, I was having a difficult time cutting weight, and used a dietary supplement that I was assured was safe and not prohibited from use in sports competition,” Santos wrote. “It was never my intention to obtain an unfair advantage over Hiroko, mislead Strikeforce, the commission or my fans. I train harder than any fighter in MMA and do not need drugs to win in the cage, and I have proven this time and time again! My only mistake is not verifying the diet aid with my doctor beforehand, and understanding that it was not approved for use in the ring. Unfortunately in the end I suffer the consequences and must accept the responsibility for my actions.”
Santos is going to have to specify the supplement and be able to prove that supplement has Stanazolol in it or else nobody is going to believe her. She later claimed, without saying the name of the supplement, that she took a diet pill/diuretic to cut weight which is what triggered the positive test. Once again, I don’t know of a diuretic that contains Winstrol V, but more importantly, diuretics, which she didn’t test positive for, are also banned substances for fighters. She claimed it was an oral pill that she thought was a diuretic, claiming she has a fear of needles. While there have been supplements shown to cause positive tests for certain banned substances, there is no documentation of any supplement or diet aid that would make you test positive for Stanazolol, and the fear of needles is a tough one to take seriously given her tattoos. But we’ve created an environment where athletes believe they are forced to lie, and in this situation, what else can she say?
But even more so, this failure is going to be treated very differently than any other. First off, when a guy fails, the reaction is usually negative from an audience that believes them to be cheating, while another audience believes that everyone is cheating and they were just unlucky or stupid to get caught. The truth is probably somewhere between those two beliefs. But steroids don’t taint legacies of men who fail, at least that badly, or end careers. Josh Barnett has failed three steroid tests over the years, still hasn’t been licensed in California where he failed the last time, but has been able to continue his career and is in the finals of the Strikeforce Grand Prix tournament and came across as one of the biggest stars on the recent New Year’s Eve show in Japan. Vitor Belfort is still a major star, who got a title shot after testing positive for steroids, and his attempt to get back in the title picture isn’t going to be affected at all by his test result from a few years back. Chael Sonnen is one of the most heavily promoted fighters on the UFC roster and was also used by UFC even though he hadn’t been licensed in the state where he was suspended. Royce Gracie is still considered a legend in the sport and his test failure in his final win, a listed win over rival Kazushi Sakuraba, is considered a minor footnote in his career.
But with Santos, the reaction is different. It is exceedingly unlikely that Santos is the only woman fighting in MMA who uses performance enhancing drugs. As best we can tell, she’s the second somewhat name woman fighter (Carina Damm was the first) to test positive for steroids. However, she does both look and fight completely different than any major star. Does this mean she is simply predisposed to getting great results from training and steroids, because everyone is different? Does this mean she uses more than anyone else?
While steroids are a performance enhancer in men, they are far more of a competitive advantage to women, because women naturally produce very little testosterone, so when you jack it up to the level of a male, it’s far more of unbalancing the playing field. Worse, given that if anything, she didn’t look quite as physically impressive in her last fight, it would be hard to believe this was an isolated incident.
The reality is you would have to be naive to believe she was clean from the day she arrived in the U.S. But, she is hardly the only star in the sport you would say that about. But the reaction is, because she’s a woman, who has been so dominant, that every win is in question and her legacy is destroyed. Although she passed all tests, the feeling is now that she cheated with steroids to run through Gina Carano, the sport’s former princess. And while some defenders of steroids in the sport who try to say that in a skill sport it doesn’t make a difference, the fact is when it comes to just fighting skill, Santos is no better than a lot of the woman fighters. I remember talking with Marloes Coenen, about her fight with Liz Carmouche, who she noted was strong but never hurt her. When asking about her compared with Cyborg, it was like, she was nothing, Cyborg was strong like a man. There is the famous clip of her power bombing a 220 pound Tito Ortiz in practice when caught in a triangle that takes low back strength like a 170 pound fit athletic woman would not have. She hit too hard and was too strong for her opponents. In this case, her power and aggression, both of which now have to be taken into question, was the difference maker.
Yet you want us to believe that the camp she comes from will find this athletic woman and make her an experiment, and that the guys aren’t learning from the experiment? It’s more likely what she did was based on what was successful with the guys, and not the other way around.
In a year, when her suspension is up, does she even get another chance? Her test result release wasn’t even a few hours old when the decision was made to drop her entire weight class from competition. Although if Carano, now a movie star, wants to come back, I would expect they would revive the division for her marketability given Carano had enough trouble making 145, and you’re asking for trouble if you want her to fight at 135.
You have to look no farther than Ben Johnson in sprinting, who after his positive test in 1988 garnered more attention to drug use in sports than anything in history, that he continued his career and due to pressure, had to be drug free. He went from blowing away the field to being mediocre, such was the difference. And that’s just running. MMA is a skill sport to be sure, and all the steroids in the world won’t make you a Cris Cyborg or fill in the blank of the top star male fighter that you deep down know has gotten there with chemical help. But can they make a very skilled good fighter into one far more difficult to beat? Are they a major difference maker? If everything else is equal, they are likely a major difference maker. Yet you’ve got a sport where the testing is years behind the times and something that those in the profession largely laugh and wink at. It’s the secret of the sport that everyone brings up behind closed doors but few want to talk about publicly. And it will likely, for the men, continue to be like that.
But the reaction is different here, as instead of maybe being a cheater, you had a situation where there was a fighter so head-and-shoulders above her competition that she didn’t belong. While Yamanaka was by no means a great fighter, and she herself came into the fight with a record based on beating much smaller women, she was legitimately the No. 1 contender worldwide in the eyes of many, and only lasted 16 seconds. Before the Carano fight, the consensus was that Carano was the more skilled stand-up fighter, but there was a strength and power difference she’d have to deal with. The reality was, she wasn’t competitive. Coenen, with far more experience and a ground specialist, wasn’t competitive either.
But here is the issue. She also passed every test necessary until this last one. And physically, she actually looked very slightly off in San Diego as compared to previous big fights. If a guy tests positive and comes back with a new physique where you can see a significant difference when it comes to losing tightness or muscle bulk, then they probably returned clean. If there is little difference, most likely they are just smarter when it comes to not getting caught. If Santos was caught because her handlers made a mental error, or because her system played a dirty trick on her because clearance periods of different drugs are not 100% and that’s why a few people do get caught, the reality is she could have just as easily gone through her whole career without this taint. It’s the thin line for having a career for a woman end in disgrace, and being lauded historically as the greatest ever in her sport.
The result of the fight held on the 12/17 Strikeforce show at the Valley View Casino Center in San Diego, has been overturned by the commission and ruled a no contest.
“Our primary concern is for the health and safety of fighters, said CSAC Executive Officer George Dodd in a press release sent out on Friday. “Anabolic agents and other banned substances put not only the users of those agents at risk, but their opponents as well. The commission simply will not tolerate their use.”’
The release stated that the commission received the test results on 12/23 from the World Anti-doping Agency lab at UCLA.
The release didn’t state the length of time of the suspension, but that it would start on 12/16. In the past, California has suspended fighters who fail steroid tests for one year. Santos, generally considered the best female fighter in the world, has the right to appeal the suspension.
In its history, UFC has had three occasions where current champions had test positive for steroids, and get suspended. Josh Barnett was the first, in 2002, in the match where he defeated Randy Couture for the heavyweight title in Las Vegas. Tim Sylvia in 2003, failed after a successful title defense against Gan McGee, also in Las Vegas. Lightweight champion Sean Sherk in 2007 failed in California after a title defense against Hermes Franca.
In all three cases, the champions were stripped of their titles.
Stanazolol is the anabolic agent that sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for in the 1988 Olympics. It is used in weight class sports because it is believed to lead to increases or maintenance of strength levels while cutting weight to make a weight class.
Generally, injectable Stanazolol clears ones system when it comes to urine tests in about two months, while the oral version clears in three weeks.
Santos, like most fighters, walks around significantly higher than the 145 pounds she weighs-in at, and has in the past had trouble making weight.
She became the first Strikeforce women’s champion on August 15, 2009, when she stopped Carano, at the HP Pavilion in San Jose before 13,976 fans. It was the first time a woman’s fight was ever the main event of a major boxing or MMA show, and the match set ratings records for MMA on Showtime. The fight was the most searched item on Yahoo and the single most talked about topic in the world on that night on Twitter. Santos, who was noted for fighting a wild, aggressive, crowd pleasing style, was too physically strong for Carano and finished her with strikes on the ground at 4:59. But Santos’ fights since that time have not had anywhere close to the same level of interest.
The fight with Yamanaka was the first for Santos in 19 months after a lengthy contractual dispute.
Santos, with her physique that looks like a female bodybuilder, had been the most dominant female fighter on the U.S. scene ever since her arrival from Brazil in 2008.
Originally a standout handball player in Brazil, she began fighting at the age of 19. A native of Curatiba, Brazil, she started at the same academy that produced Wanderlei Silva, who her fighting style has always been compared to, and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. She married Evangelista “Cyborg” Santos, who was a well known fighter who became a star in Japan and at one time challenged for the Strikeforce welterweight title.
The couple moved to San Diego, where she teaches and trains at a gym called The Arena.
In recent weeks, Rousey had all but directly said Santos was on steroids, with lines that Santos would be able to make 135 pounds if she stopped doing what she was doing.
“I feel like anyone with half a brain isn’t surprised,” Rousey said on The MMA Show with Mauro Ranallo. “I have mixed emotions of Cyborg being caught cheating because I know everyone knew she was cheating and I wanted to make an example of her because you don’t need to take steroids to win. I think her getting caught is a great thing too. I don’t have the least bit of respect for her because I always knew she was a cheater, and now everyone else knows too. If she ever comes back to fight again, she won’t be the same beast she was before. She might even try doing different things like HGH that are harder to get caught for. Who knows if Strikeforce ever wants her back.”
“Well, I am disappointed to find out she was using,” wrote Tate. “I gave her the benefit of the doubt too, and really admired her.”
“Don’t want to kick an opponent when she’s down,” wrote Marloes Coenen. “I still respect her and we will meet again at Invicta.”
Dr. Rosi Sexton (a PHD in Theoretical Computer Science, not a medical doctor although she is a practicing osteopath and Cambridge University graduate ), a female fighter with Bellator, responded by writing in Bloodyelbow.com that after seeing the news, “I felt a little like a ten year old whose parents have just admitted that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. A tiny bit disappointed, but mostly relieved that now we can all stop pretending.”
She noted that when people defend use, or see it as a non-issue, based on the idea everyone is taking them, that they miss the point.
“The problem is that this is a combat sport. In most sports, the consequences of failure might be measured in pride, status or money. IN MMA, you add physical damage and injury. In female MMA, for example, you can find yourself watching a fighter who is essentially (in hormonal terms) male, beat up a woman. It often makes for uncomfortable viewing. It’s bad for the sport, and most of all, it’s bad for the fighters. It sends the message that following the rules is penalized by getting your face smashed in.”
She also noted that those defending Cyborg by saying she trained so hard are naive, saying , “Look, just working hard in the gym won’t give a woman muscles like that any more than eating worms and flapping your arms will make you fly.”
The issue here is that if you see photos of Santos at the start of her career, and the after photos, the change is remarkable. You can lose weight, gain muscle, gain weight through training, diet and eating. But she has the exact same facial changes as a high level competitive female bodybuilder. She’s also passed all her previous tests, which speak more to the ease of passing those tests.
Sexton noted that there is a reality of the sport, and everyone knows it. Right now you have the ultimate hypocrisy situation, and this is not blaming anyone in specific, yet in a sense everyone in power is part of the problem.
You have a situation where performance enhancing drugs are illegal in the sport, but are greatly rewarded. You get bigger, stronger, hit harder and can recover from more training. There are downsides. You can gas out quicker, but if you have good advisers, that won’t be the case. While you can recover from injuries faster, you also will get nagging injuries more often due to muscle imbalances. And if you’re really unlucky, or really stupid, you may fail a test and if you’re a champion and a woman, it’ll taint your entire career. If you’re a guy, you’ll be thrashed everywhere, lose sponsors, but if you’re a nice guy about it, fans will eventually forget. If you can draw money, people in power will immediately forget.
If you examine risk vs. reward, the scales are heavily balanced toward reward. And I don’t know if there’s anything that can change that, because the same goes for all Olympic sports, and they have the hardest testing in the world. Still, a lot more can be done. But for financial reasons, it can’t be done by athletic commissions. Some commissions I believe do as much as they can afford to do financially. Others don’t care. Situations with Chael Sonnen, Nate Marquardt and Alistair Overeem have in every case put commissions in a bad light. You have members of commissions who clearly understand the subject, and other political appointees who are clearly over their heads in dealing with it.
Sonnen was never cleared by the commission that suspended him. While his situation came at great cost, easily seven figures to him for having his momentum delayed and losing his rematch opportunity with Anderson Silva (some of it may be recouped if he gets the shot this year, but not all), he is still one of the most heavily promoted athletes on the Zuffa roster. Marquardt lost his job, but for reasons nobody can adequately explain, was not suspended even though he had too much testosterone in his system in a test, something that has actually never been fully proven about Sonnen. Overeem was ordered on 11/17 by the Nevada commission to take a test within the next two days. While he took tests over the next few weeks, the first test was the wrong test and didn’t have a steroid panel (it did show him in normal testosterone range), the second test sample somehow disappeared with no results, and the first test with results, where he was clean, was taken on 12/14.
But even throwing these three out, unless you are a main event fighter on a major show in California and Nevada where you may get tested during camp, you can use most PEDs, with the exception of the ones that stay in your system a long time, with impunity in training. You know when to get off, and it’s no difference than knowing when to taper down hardcore training to be fully rested for fight day, and no different from manipulating your diet to make sure you make weight on fight day, and then come back as big as possible 27 or so hours later when you step in the cage. Some PEDs, Growth Hormone, you can take with impunity if you want right until the afternoon of the fight, as there is no testing for it. And while some will claim differently because there is a test being used in the Olympics, there is actually no significant test for it because to this day athletes use that drug with impunity and with no fear of a test that never catches anyone except a few near setups that have been used to prove its effectiveness in a scare tactic.
Sexton wrote:
We have a choice to make. We can decide that we want steroids out of the sport. In that case, athletic commissions, governing bodies, promotions alike need to work together to implement the gold standard of drug policies. The World Anti-Doping Agency works with sporting organizations and produces model rules and protocols. As a minimum, off season random testing of fighters is essential. It might never be possible to get rid of performance enhancing drugs entirely, but it’s possible to tighten the net and change the balance between risk and reward in favor of the clean athlete. Some of the athletic commissions are starting to move toward stricter testing, but much more still needs to be done.
Right now the major promotions have the government scapegoat. The governmental agencies regulate the sport in their states, but all are financially unable to do the level of testing necessary. Plus, there is already a dual reality, to where if you are a main eventer in Nevada, you have to implement a different drug program than if you are a main eventer in Texas. And if you are a mid-card fighter, no matter where, you have more leeway than a main eventer because you’re only going to be tested the day of the show no matter where you fight. And if you are in a smaller organization in a number of states, you probably won’t be tested. It’s impossible to have the sport be what it should be as far as testing. It’s not going to happen. However, UFC can and should implement a policy. It’s embarrassing if you think about it that in a sports competition, where a woman like Cyborg was for years able to beat up women who were likely either not chemically enhanced, or at least not to the level she was, that athletes have a far easier testing program than wrestlers in the WWE. And lord knows there are major issues in the WWE program, and it’s not close to as strong as the one track athletes have to go through. And in track, or in baseball, it’s all about world records and statistical numbers. In MMA, it’s about avoiding getting your face smashed in. In baseball, you can argue that long-term health issues are involved. In pro wrestling, there are even greater arguments due to the track record of the profession. But in MMA, or kickboxing, or boxing, the reality is, it’s not only a competitive advantage, but in more cases than not, it’s safer. Whatever issues someone taking reasonable doses may have health wise later in life is not going to be as pressing a concern as avoiding getting the hell beaten out of you next week by a chemically enhanced athlete.
Of course, then you have all kinds of issues as we’ve seen with not just WWE, but in football, baseball and other sports, where some very fishy things happen when large sums of money are at stake. Alistair Overeem situations, while not exact, happen in all testing sports when there are star performers, from getting advanced notice for supposed random tests, to covering up results or delaying the implementation of results. We’ve created a generation of athletes who are taught by the time they are in college to lie at all costs. The honest ones are snitches, and often reprimanded by authorities. It is so deeply imbedded in many sports at the top level, and pro wrestling is a sport in this regard, that PEDs are simply part of the game that you deny at all cost, and that testing is a necessary evil that you learn the protocol of and learn how not to get caught. There is a belief, whether true or not, that deep down, whether it’s the NFL, UFC, WWE or the Olympics, that the authorities don’t care one way or the other what you’re using, only that you don’t get caught under their watch and ruin plans. Those in charge may argue that is unfair, and I don’t doubt in some cases it is, but it is a prevailing belief among the athletes involved.
There is no other viable answer. Eliminating the drug testing completely will give the sport a far more negative public stigma, threaten future sponsorship and even, if something terrible happens, threatens the sport’s life blood because the wrong thing at the wrong time could threaten current and future television deals. The answer to the problem right now, the current situation is the easiest.
Or, as Sexton stated:
We can decide that all this is too much trouble. The point is often made that MMA is more a business than a sport, and it’s true that many casual fans are more concerned about seeing exciting fights than what the athletes are taking before they get into the cage.
If this is the route we want to go down, then we should change the rules and allow athletes to use drugs freely, without the stigma of cheating attached. Of course there are risks and side effects, but we can at least have an honest, grown up decision about the medical issues, without the hypocrisy that surrounds the subject at the moment. Athletes could make an informed decision to balance the risks of the drugs against the risks of being the one not taking them. Neither set of risks should be underestimated. As a fighter, I’ve never used steroids, and I don’t want to start now. Of the two options, I’d prefer to see an improved standard of testing. But the important thing for the sport and everyone involved in it, is that we come clean about it one way or the other.
