Cerrone says he received a ‘whereabouts failure’ for missing USADA drug test

Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

Donald Cerrone appears to have fallen victim to his own lifestyle.

The UFC lightweight title challenger revealed on the Pirate Life podcast that he failed his first drug test recently because he didn’t report his whereabouts to the United States Anti-Doping Agency ahead of time.

According to Cerrone, sample collectors showed up at his doorstep shortly after he decided to take a spontaneous trip to Las Vegas, Nevada.

“In the new testing, you have to tell them [UFC/USADA] your whereabouts,” Cerrone revealed. “F***, I don’t know where I’m going to be. They show up to my house and are like ‘where are you this weekend?’ It was on the weekend that I went to Vegas on a whim.

“They were like ‘where are you?’ and I was like ‘I’m in Vegas’. And they were like ‘we’re at your house’. And I was like ‘well that sucks.'”

“So I failed. I failed my drug test.”

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Cerrone received a ‘whereabouts failure’ for his decision not to report his projected location. Missed tests and filing failures are considered ‘whereabouts failures.’ It should be noted that, according to the USADA website, “any combination of three whereabouts failures (filing failures and/or missed tests), declared by USADA, WADA or an IF, within a 12 month period = Anti-Doping Rule Violation”.

However, given that this was Cerrone’s first violation, it will not affect his title shot against Rafael dos Anjos at UFC on FOX 17.

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About the author

Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.