Opinion: The Real Life-and-Death Question About MMA Health and Safety

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.*** Almost as soon as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency started busting UFC fighters in and out of competition, USADA itself became an ingrained, almost memetic presence in MMA. Even before Jon Jones or Brock Lesnar’s positive tests put an indelible stain on UFC 200, before Chad Mendes was slapped with a two-year suspension, fans had already taken to shouting “USADA!” any time a UFC fighter stepped on the scale with any difference in physique or changed weight classes. We’re barely a year into USADA testing the UFC roster, but the size and scope of the project, combined with the sensationally news-y nature of a failed anti-doping test, ensures that every MMA outlet’s newswire has one or two USADA-related stories per day, at least. However, in the wake of Jones and Lesnar — the sport’s best fighter and arguably its most bankable star — both getting popped for the estrogen blocker clomiphene, USADA conversations this week have headed in a more extreme direction. Maybe this is the natural extension of a philosophically charged, hot button topic like doping, especially when it becomes the dominant conversation for an entire sport. Maybe this is an expected outcome when that news concerns fighters with names like Jones and Lesnar, tempting opinionated people who otherwise don’t traffic heavily in MMA to share their hot takes. Regardless of the reason, it was a week for ham-fisted and shortsighted moralizing, a week in which Forbes ran an article called “PED Use in Combat Sports Should Be a Criminal Offense”. Whether you deeply care about a “clean sport” or think pro sports should be a chemical free-for-all, this vein of thinking isn’t just reactionary, it’s also wrong. This sort of media hysteria positions doping in MMA or combat sports on the whole as, if not the greatest of all evils to be purged, than at least the most pressing as it concerns fighter health and safety. This is simply not true. The basic argument, of course, is that prizefighters’ explicit goal is to do physical damage to one another and therefore a juiced-to-the-gills fighter is uniquely dangerous to his opponent. The great question in these discussions is always “What if a fighter in the UFC died as a result of injuries in a fight, then his opponent tested positive for PEDs?” This hypothetical shouldn’t be completely disregarded; it’s a very serious question that is not beyond the realm of possibility. However, if you consider the deaths that have occurred in MMA, there is a common theme and it’s certainly not PEDs. When Douglas Dedge died in 1998 after a bout in Ukraine, it wasn’t because of PEDs, it was because he was an undertrained fighter who had been blacking out in the gym long before he flew across the Atlantic Ocean to fight. When Sam Vasquez became the first fighter to die after a sanctioned, regulated MMA bout in Texas in 2007, it wasn’t steroids. When Michael Kirkham and Tyrone Mims died barely two years apart in the same state, South Carolina, hormones were not the cause. Grim as it is, when you look over a list of the fatalities that have happened in MMA, the common theme is either non-existent or lacking regulatory and medical oversight. This has always been …

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