Rockhold for more testing ‘especially Black House’

UFC middleweight Luke Rockhold appeared recently on CBS Sports Radio’s Gio and Jones show and discussed PED use in mixed martial arts.

It’s sad, said Rockhold, 30, who fights out of AKA. It’s a sad day in MMA when Anderson Silva gets popped for steroids, no doubt. It’s an epidemic right now. There’s a lot of guys (who have been caught), but things are moving in the right way. They’re blood testing, they’re pre-fight testing, and things are changing. So I’m happy to be a part of that. I’m pushing hard. I like the blood tests. I’m a clean fighter. I always will be.

I’m not a fan of (cheating), and I definitely am pushing for more drug testing, more random blood testing and whatnot. Especially Black House camp. There’s been (three or four guys from that camp who have been caught cheating) and Machida is a Black House guy.”

I think he’s a clean fighter, but I’m definitely pushing (for more testing). I want a clean sport, like baseball. We need to get on their level. Let’s start cleaning things up a little bit here.

(If I cheated) I couldn’t live with myself, to tell you the truth. It would just never happen. I’m a true competitor. It’s funny. I got injured and I was out for about 19 months. I had a bad shoulder injury I kept re-injuring, and people started getting into my ear trying to tell me I could recover faster and get back in. I just kept blocking them off.

Just random people stopping in and out of training camps and stuff like that. There’s always a couple bad seeds that pop in. But luckily, I have such a great training camp. We have the cleanest, strongest camp. We push out the bad seeds. We want to keep our camp clean.

We’re a core group. And we keep everything solid and a family atmosphere.

Rockhold fights Lyoto Machida, 36, at UFC on FOX 15 on April 18 in Newark, New Jersey.

My fight with Vitor kind of set me back, made me rethink what I’m doing and how I’m approaching it mentally,” said Rockhold. “(I’m) just letting go and just focusing and enjoying the moment. I’m excited (for my fight with Machida). There’s nothing bigger than this.

There has never been even a hint of PED use by Lyoto Machida. Given that “The Dragon” has lived his life as a pillar of honor, and never even cut weight for fights, the idea of him taking PEDs is implausible in the extreme. That said, Rockhold’s fears about Black House MMA are not irrational. Three fighters from the camp tested positive for the same steroid, drostanolone, since 2014. The latest was the greatest fighter in UFC history, Anderson Silva. And he failed twice. Further, when your head S&C coach looks like this at a reported age of 57, well, it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

Performance enhancing drugs have been endemic in mixed martial arts since the 1990s. The advent of random, out of competition tests has a failure rate of around 25%, and in most cases, the fighters knew they were going to be tested out of competition. We are now in a new era in the sport, and a beautiful day will come soon when fighters no longer have to assume their opponent is on PEDs.