Chael Sonnen recently spoke about Jon Jones’ third drug test failure — his second during the USADA era. As a person who has been caught and admits to have thoroughly used PEDs in his career, he gave some interesting insights about his former opponent’s positive test.
He makes the distinction that Turinabol is an illegal substance — and not just one that is banned for competition — and that there wouldn’t be much legitimate explanations on why it’s found in someone’s system.
“As far as (Turinabol), you’d have to go to a museum to find that. That’s not something that a person would take,” Sonnen said on the MMA Hour. “On the list of performance enhancers, it’s probably number 8 on the list. You might be thinking ‘8, that’s pretty good,’ well, there’s only about 10 substances on that list.”
According to Sonnen, if they caught Jones with Turinabol, USADA must have likely missed other substances he was taking along with it.
“To take that, you would traditionally take that in a stack,” he explained. “I don’t know what Jon did, I’m speculating off of what I’ve done. If they catch something like that, they missed the good stuff.
“So yeah, he’s got to deal with this. There’s no contaminated substance — this stuff is pretty hard to get. It’s pretty expensive, if you do get it.”
New testing has recently been rolled out on WADA-accredited labs, that can detect the use of Turinabol weeks or months after it was taken.
According to Sonnen, even if he believes it won’t happen, Jones should probably just come clean.
“I have found that commissions and public — the quicker you come clean, the better. That’s one guy’s opinion, but it’s mine. Jones is never going to do that in a million years,” he said. “He’s going to lie in his inner circle. He’s going to take it to the grave. A lot of times, that will come back to bite you.
“If you did a dishonest act, sometimes the most honest thing you can do is to say ‘yeah, you got me.’”
Sonnen was also asked if he believes Jones has been using PEDs for most of his decorated career, especially considering the two failed USADA tests.
“All I can tell you is that I had a higher juice concentrate than Tropicana, and he pushed me around like a mack truck vs a volvo,” he said. “I think for the better part of his career, that seems to be how it works.”
Sonnen’s interview starts at the 1:12:00 mark.
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