The UFC has never been busier than it is right now. With a non-stop event schedule even minor news can quickly reach a fever pitch as it seems that UFC fighters and employees are spending more time in front of the cameras than ever. Of course, the news right now is anything but minor. With GSP stepping away from the sport Dana White has been incredibly vocal about how surprising and unfair he feels the former champions accusations are. While many of his statements were more or less the same from the stance he later delivered on Fox Sports Live, he had one notably new bit of spin on the Georges St-Pierre situation (emphasis is mine):
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Obviously shocked when he came out and said this. First of all, if everybody remembers, when Georges St-Pierre said he wanted to come out and do this extra drug testing it was so that he could prove that he wasn’t on drugs. He didn’t come out and say “Hey, I want to do extra drug testing because I think Johny Hendricks is on drugs.” Everybody has been saying that they think Georges St-Pierre is on it for years, so he wanted to prove that he wasn’t.
Now our guys who deal with the regulatory issues sat in on this thing. It’s just like in boxing, how many times have you seen in boxing where a guy comes out and says he wants extra testing because he doesn’t know about this guy. Then they sit down and he says “I want to use this company,” and then the other guy is like, “Well I don’t want to use that company. I want to use this one.” It’s exactly what went down in the Georges St-Pierre case.
And there’s never going to be a situation where the Athletic Commission isn’t involved. And the Athletic Commission was involved in this whole thing, tired to make it happen and at the end of the day Georges St-Pierre ended up not doing it. Nobody told Georges he couldn’t do it or he wasn’t supported. I said it was ridiculous. I came out and said the thing was ridiculous. You’re never going to get two guys that are fighting each other to agree on what drug testing they’re going to do. So, the whole thing is really weird…
It’s a interesting take on mess that became Georges’ campaign for VADA drug testing as, eventually, he did undergo the testing in its entirety. He merely did so alone. He was, for reasons that still remain a bit unclear, told that he would not be able to have WADA oversight for the NSAC testing as his lawyer had an ill timed vacation already on schedule. It appears that at no point did GSP voluntarily back out of any drug testing that he planned to go through.
Aside from GSP’s increasingly tumultuous departure from the UFC, White also commented on Anderson Silva, restating that the former champ should be off crutches in a month and back training in less than six. He sounded unsure as to whether he actually wanted to see Silva return to competition, but I expect if Silva wants to come back he will.
There’s an interesting note on Travis Browne as well. It sounds like he will be headlining the upcoming card in Orlando in his bout against Fabricio Werdum. He recently signed a new contract with the UFC as his last one expired after his fight against Barnett. White noted that Browne was looking for a big raise in pay and the UFC told him to fight Barnett and then talk to them again (we saw how well that worked for Cheick Kongo). The gamble appears to have paid off as Dana suggested that they were happy to open up the checkbook for him after his UFC 168 performance.
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