Georges St. Pierre’s decision to walk away from the UFC, still at this time being called a “hiatus” more than a “retirement” by most, didn’t come with many explanations. But St. Pierre is now speaking out about at least one issue that contributed to his decision to take a break.
St. Pierre is laying at least partial blame at the feet of the UFC for refusing to support him in his efforts to “clean up the sport” through more stringent drug testing.
“It bothered me a lot,” St. Pierre says in an article at RDS.ca. “It’s one of the reasons why I stopped.” St. Pierre continued, “Not really to serve them a lesson, because it penalizes me too. But I wanted to do something for the sport that I love. I see the direction in which it goes and I think it makes no sense. This is stupid.”
It’s worth remembering the bizarre way that the attempts by the St. Pierre camp to have VADA testing for his bout with Johny Hendricks were handled. It went from GSP’s camp wanting VADA testing to Hendricks and the UFC working to have the Nevada State Athletic Commission do enhanced testing using WADA guidelines. After St. Pierre agreed to do both the enhanced testing through the NSAC and the VADA testing — meaning two sets of random testing — the NSAC pulled the plug on the whole thing when St. Pierre’s representative said he (Rodolphe Beaulieu) be unavailable for a ten day period starting August 17. Former NSAC executive director said that even though Beaulieu clearly stated GSP would do both the NSAC and VADA testing, Beaulieu being gone for 10 days three months before the fight “didn’t take a genius to figure out that was a ‘no.'”
Around the same time, Dana White was going around in public saying GSP’s desire to have extra drug testing was “a little weird” among other suggestions that he should drop the whole idea.
So it’s not hard to figure out why he felt that no one had his back on this issue.
Note: Quotes from the RDS article were a rough translation.
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