Jon Jones is making UFC history, and not in a good way. The UFC light heavyweight champion had his belt stripped after a hit and run incident where he literally ran from his wrecked car into the hills of Albuquerque. 15 months later he returned to win the interim 205 pound belt and was set to face champ Daniel Cormier at UFC 200 when a positive drug test caused by sexual performance pills resulted in him being pulled from the card. And now that his USADA arbitration found him guilty of reckless behavior in taking those pills and suspended him for one year, the UFC is once again stripping Jones of his belt.
Jones becomes the first fighter in UFC history to be stripped of two belts.
“Jon Jones has blown it in every way shape and form a guy with that much talent can blow it,” UFC president Dana White said when announcing the decision on the ESPN 5 Rounds Podcast. “Greatest talent ever and the biggest screw-up ever. … He was the interim champion because he should have been fighting for the title [in April]. We gave him this, ‘You were supposed to fight for the title, here it is.’ It doesn’t make sense with all the stuff that is going on for him to still be the interim champion.”
With Jon Jones’ suspension being set to the date of his drug failures, he’ll be eligible to fight again in July of 2017 … if the Nevada State Athletic Commission doesn’t decide to punish him worse than USADA. The American commission system and USADA system are completely different and separate so they may not buy Jones’ excuse that (in Jon’s own words) ‘dick pills’ were behind the clomiphene and letrozole in his system.
And really, when cheating is being done at such a high level, how hard is it to have a couple of innocuous products ‘tainted’ with the drugs you’re using at hand so you have a reasonable sounding excuse to give fans and the commission? The question: is Jon Jones and his team that smart? Or are they as dumb as Dana White makes them out to be? One thing is for sure: he’ll be going down in the history books for this now, and for all the wrong reasons.