Weidman: What bugs me most about Silva PED fail
Chris Weidman: “The thing that bothers me the most about this Anderson Silva thing and different guys getting caught, is that it’s more about the younger guys coming up.”
Dan Gable said that before the 1972 Munich Olympics, if he knew an opponent was taking performance enhancing drugs, it gave him an advantage.
I knew I was going to wrestle in the finals of the Olympics against a Russian and I knew he had been training specifically to beat me, but then I knew the guy was on steroids, That would help me. Whereas some might think ‘oh he’s cheating, for me you didn’t pay the price. You’re not as committed as I am. It’ll tear him apart. He may be strong, but all I have to do during that nine minutes of wrestling is loosen one single wire in his brain, make him do something that isn’t perfect, and he’ll fall apart.
Besides the health effects, what you lose when you use steroids is mental toughness. The key to victory is that the strongest mind wins. You can get physical strength with steroids, but you lose the mental toughness from brutal hard work. Steroids hurt mental toughness by serving as a crutch.
Gable won gold without a single point being score on him.
In an interview with FightHub, UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman expressed a similar view, and added that what bothers him most about Anderson Silva failing a PED test is that it may encourage younger fighters to cheat too.
“I was always under the belief that at least the top guys weren’t taking. I really believed that,” said Weidman as transcribed by David St. Martin for MMAfighting. “I was naive. I thought taking steroids and performance enhancers is a mental weakness that the top, cream of the crop guys didn’t have to take. It was the guys that weren’t capable of being the best that needed them to try to hang with the best.”
“I’m just completely surprised by Anderson Silva,. I’m not the guy who likes to kick people when they’re down so I’m not going to smear his name any more than it’s been smeared. I’m going to say it’s disappointing. I just always thought the champions, if you look at them, muscular-wise, they’re not these jacked up guys.”
“The thing that bothers me the most about this Anderson Silva thing and different guys getting caught, is that it’s more about the younger guys coming up. Now they’re going to think they have to start taking steroids. Now they’re going to speculate that Anderson Silva took it his whole career. His legacy is in question at this point. There’s no going back on that.
“They’re going to imagine that he was doing it, so he made, who knows, let’s say $50 million. ‘If he did that and he was able to take care of himself for the rest of his life, he and his family, maybe it’s worth doing it.’ My message to them is that I’m champion and I’ve never taken any PED. I would never do that.”
“I’ll retire early if my body can’t hold up. It’s just tough. You’re fighting through injuries. You just can’t do it. I just don’t want these younger fighters to think that that’s the way to become champion and make a legacy for yourself. I still firmly believe that taking PEDs is because you’re weak minded and you have insecurities about yourself. You’re trying to fill the void with PEDs. Winners, true winners, don’t have that.”
Weidman fights Vitor Belfort on May 23 at UFC 187 in Las Vegas, Nevada.