BTG 143 - Enhanced Combat Sports League

[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, I'm going to address uh a user question based on some feedback I was getting in one of my posts, which was about steroids and PEDs. And I think the particular question was addressing one, my stance on them, which I think is pretty well known now. But I'll add a second question. Two, what would I think of having a league that was completely clean and then the alternative, a league that was a pet league? Because there are games now that called enhanced games which I guess are different like uh sprinting, long-distance running, different like type of Olympic sports that now they're specifically requesting people be quote unquote enhanced taking you know doing blood doping and steroids and whatever else to get the most performance. So that's an interesting twist to that argument. Uh let's start with the first though which is my stance on peeds. I dislike them. I wish they didn't exist. Uh I wish no one was using them. I think especially in combat sports, it's incredibly reckless and and dangerous. Not in so much as for the user. I obviously we have seen people who have been able to use peeds in some form for a long time. I think top of my head, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, he's lived well past his life expectancy. So, I think uh he's proved it is possible to go longer in life um and still be able to use a combination of these peeds uh I don't know specifically what he was doing, but uh he clearly was successful. So, you know, I guess good job. I don't know. But I think when we're talking about the there well there's a few things. One rule set, right? If the rule say you can't do it, you can't do it. That's just it. And in combat sports, at least in mixed martial arts in the in the United States, it says you're not supposed to be doing it. And people are doing it, right? You could see the physiques in some of the fighters and you're like, man, it makes you scratch your head, right? Like, how is this guy passing a test? But they always have a way around testing, right? Because somebody has to design the test and then someone can, you know, work around that to beat those tests. And it doesn't take much from an eyeball test to understand like who's doing what, right? I think the most obvious uh juicer in history was probably Vtor Belelfford, right? And you could see when he makes his UFC debut at 18, his traps begin at his ears. The guy's neck started like this, you know? Uh and that's a very obvious telltale sign, overdevelopment of the traps. Again, normally these muscles don't grow to that extent before all your other muscle does. And you know his traps are just so you could usually see that in people. The other one is like the roid gut, right? Which is more actually the HGH gut. People take human growth hormone. All of your organs grow. So then you end up getting this what appears to be a belly but it's not actually like fat. What it is is that your intestines has also grown besides the muscles. And that also means your heart has grown. all your organs everywhere. So, not great, right? You can also see guys who have what they call cranial bossing where, you know, your the brow starts to extend a bit more. You start looking more crow magnum. Another sign of somebody doing HGH. Uh, and it doesn't take many looks to see that in a lot of the top athletes in grappling and in mixed martial arts. So steroids is and peeds of all forms are very prevalent and we're not talking about even people just doing stuff like blood doping to improve the like their stamina or whatnot. Uh, so there's a lot of it going around, right? And on one hand, like stuff like HGH, from my understanding of it, again, I'm not a doctor or a specialist, but uh, from what I've read and and what I've seen, it definitely has a lot of long-term health consequences. Anybody who has an enlarged heart is at a higher risk of having a cardiac event. So, not great. you know, having your stomach pushed out because your intestines are growing, obviously not great. And uh there's people who have been using steroids for so long and they probably didn't cycle like you're supposed to. So, they end up losing all indogenous testosterone production. They can't produce testosterone anymore. Their testicles are basically nonfunctional. And now in order to maintain any level of testosterone, they have to be injecting themselves for the rest of their lives. And I know a few people like that. So obviously not great. We have athletic commissions in this sport for mixed martial arts and the entire reason for this from my understanding is fighter safety. So, if we're making it easy for people to pass these tests and not doing a lot of protocol to make sure that they're we're protecting them from themselves, so to speak, you are failing them just like you are with the weight cuts. There's a bigger problem though than just from the fighter's own health, right? Because one might say, well, maybe I am willing to take the risk. Maybe, you know, I will say that I'm ready to die at 40 years old if that means I could be a champion in my 30s, right? And there's a lot of people that would say that, right? Uh or would like to say that at least. But once you're you're 40, you're probably like, "Uh, no, I want to live longer." Uh but nevertheless, let's say there is people who have come to peace with that. There is then the problem that your opponent didn't agree to fight somebody who was cheating. Right? My case, I've been clean my whole life. Never smoked a joint. Never done any recreational drugs. Never done any performance-enhancing drugs. Uh I could probably count how many times I've taken Advil or Tylenol in my life and two hands, right? So, like I've always liked just to rest my way out of things and I've never The only injectable thing I've done is stem cells and I think I've done that four times. And that's like over a period of seven years. And that's probably the only reason I would do it. There's no consequences. It's very healing. It's helped me a lot tremendously. And I'm not competing, but even if I was, it's totally within every rule set. So, I'm not cheating, right? Uh, and it doesn't make me better than anyone else. Doesn't make me stronger. It's simply for recovery to uh heal. So I think that's for me ethically I feel great doing that right. Uh I didn't give myself a special edge over anybody else that anybody can do with no risk. So full disclosure what I've done. But if I'm fighting somebody that I know is juicing to the gills right let's say like a Peris for example. Uh, and that's getting very specific, but I am now going into this fight at a disadvantage because I know this guy, as a result, he's able to train more than I can cuz if he can he can recover faster from using steroids, he's going to get stronger and bigger. And the bigger problem with that, besides the fact that it's against the rules, he's cheating, is that in a combat sport, that additional advantage that he's getting from strength and muscle and stamina potentially is that he's going to be able to do more harm to me than if he wasn't. We can easily see this if we look at a Vtor Belelfford side by side. When you see Vtor before Usada, he's a physical specimen, just shredded, you know, traps to the ears, ginormous, right? And obviously, he knocked out a bunch of people. When we look at Vtor after Usada, his hips are wider than his shoulders. He looks like a hot mess. And behold, he doesn't fight nearly as well as he used to. Right? So, it's it clear that the Peds offered him a great advantage to do violence. And in a sport where we're trying to hurt people, magnifying somebody's abilities beyond what they can naturally do or what they can do, at least by the rules, is one of the most horrendous forms of cheating that you can do. is the equivalent from my view of putting like lead shot in your gloves. You could kill someone by cheating that way and then you' be like, "Oh, I was just trying to win." Yeah, you won by killing your opponent or hurting your opponent in a way that was terrible. I know Michael Bisping had uh not so nice words for Vtor after he got inducted into the Hall of Fame because uh I think he credited Vtor for being the guy that blinded him in the eye that he ended up losing that eyeball and he this was before USA I'm guessing. So he used his way to take uh Bisping's eye. I would be furious as well. Uh so when we consider PED use, it's not just that you're cheating. It's not that you're just putting yourself at a greater health risk. You're also putting your opponents at a greater health risk to the point where you could do serious harm by maming them or even god forbid killing somebody through your cheating. Those four reasons in itself should make it very clear that PDS doesn't belong in combat sports. Right? The other thing that I don't like about it is that now let's say I was on board like okay everybody can do what they want free country we can juice to to our hearts consent. Uh, great. But now it becomes a pharmaceutical battle and financial battle as well. Because if you guys listened to me the last time when I was talking about gyms, I could become a world champion training at a small gym from the middle of nowhere. I don't need a lot of resources. I just need good formulas, good a good coach to guide me and I can get there. Right? that's still available today and I made the case is probably more suitable in in many situations than joining a gym with a thousand fighters in it. Right? However, if I have to compete with people who have greater resources or go bigger gyms and their team of cheaters, the people who are giving you injection cycles and like, oh, okay, which drugs to take, which to cycle on, which to cycle off, you're not going to do that from a middle nowhere gym, right? You won't be able to compete. So, and plus by them doing all this stuff, they're also getting more mat time because they're recovering faster. which is probably one of the bigger benefits that people overlook. They always think about the strength advantage and that to me is only a piece of the puzzle. The bigger piece is more matt time, especially for uh athletes who are older, like you're going in your 30s, you have to reduce your your training times because you just can't recover as fast. But if you're taking that stuff, you can train as much as you want. Well, not as much as you want, but you can train more, let's say, right? Uh, so you're getting an unfair advantage in that way as well. But if I'm coming from a small gym, I'm not going to be able to pay for the type of cycles that a bigger gym could do. And even and I might not have the financial resources or the connections to be able to do so. So now I'm going to be gatekeeped by pets. And I think that's terrible, especially in a sport that is traditionally a poverty sport. Boxing, wrestling, you don't need gear. And boxing, a pair of gloves and a mouthpiece, you're good to go. Head gear, you know, uh, for wrestling, wrestling head gear, shoes, and a singlet, you're good to go. Jiu-jitsu, I mean, you ghee, if you're doing the ghee or no ghee like I was, just you really didn't need anything. So to add well now we have to spend a few thousand dollar every time we're going to fight on and that's on the low end for having a our peed schedule that's going to take out a lot of potential athletes and I think that's unfortunate right like why are we adding this right let's just keep everything on a level playing field work with what God gave you know whatever body you have and whatever you're able to build up naturally use that, right? I feel that is the most honest way of doing this. I think it's disingenuous when you are using steroids and drugs to enhance your performance and then say, "Oh, look, I'm the greatest athlete." It's like, well, you perhaps have the mind of the greatest athlete, but you kind of cheated your way into the body, right? It's kind of like a the way I see uh a Kardashian, let's say, right? A woman that is really kicked up with makeup and tons of plastic surgery. It's like if I was going to have children with her, I don't know what the kids are going to look like cuz this person has so changed fundamentally on a physical level who they are. You know, I don't know what I'm getting, right? Like they might have had a huge nose, maybe they had a tiny nose, you know, they could have had a big butt, now they have a small butt. You know, they had had no breast, now they have hu like I'm getting something very different than what actually was there. And I feel that people who are doing PEDs are kind of doing the same because part of sports is to try to figure out who what are the best body types and physiques and genetics. And of course, genetics is a big part of sport. But once you start, you know, modifying yourself in these ways, we're kind of blurring the the the lines here because I don't know what genetics you had because you've added so much, you know, testosterone and growth hormone and all this other stuff that you're like a different creature almost, right? Uh and so I don't like that part of it either. And like I said, the but the bigger issue for me more is just like we're adding a gatekeeper now in that you need to have the right doctors or pharmacists to be able to prescribe you the right types of cycles and the schedules so you don't get caught, right? And then I'm sure they're doing some cheating as far as like how they're beating piss tests and all that or blood test. So on a on a small level like if you're coming from a small gym, you're not going to be able to compete with that, right? You just won't have the resources to do that. And I think that's unfortunate, right? Uh I prefer that everything was natural. Everything's a level playing field. There's no resource that you need other than your brains and you know your body. I I feel that is the ideal there. And and when we're doing combat sports, we're not coming in with like special gear like you know basketball like the type of shoes you're wearing is an effect. If you're a skier, obviously the type of skis you have, you know, like other sports equipment is part of the strategy, like biking or whatnot. But like the beauty of combat sports is just your body and your brain. But when we start making drugs a big part of it, now we have to factor, okay, well, what's the the stack that this person's taking? Cuz that's a component that is coming into him. That is his equipment, his gear, if you will, right? I don't like it. So I I think I've outlined my case pretty well there as why the myriad of reason was I don't like peeds. Uh and even as someone who's not a competitor, I've never taken them. I will never plan on taking them. I I don't think it's uh good for long-term health. I could be wrong, right? Uh, like I said, I look at people like maybe like Joe Rogan who's taken a bunch of stuff and we'll we'll see how he does in his later years, you know, uh, if he makes it to like 80 and he's still like a bull. I'm like, okay, maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe you you could get away with this. But personally, I think there's a price to be paid when you start doing these modifications. And, uh, a lot of people I I think believe they're smarter than than nature. And I think that's uh hubris, right? Like you're you're playing with forces you don't fully understand. And uh I always feel there's a there's a price to be paid there. So I rather just, you know, Game of Thrones are use that pay the iron price, the hard price and just do it the right way. But so that's that part of the argument. Now, let's go into would I like having a natural only league and then a peed league or an quote enhanced league. I could see value in that, right? And that was basically what Pride was, right? Like Pride Fighting Championships, you know, in the early 2000 era was an enhanced league. It specifically stated in their contracts, "No testing is done on our athletes, right?" And that was like in bold letters if I remember correctly. I forgot who shared their contract. It might have been Rampage. Uh that's a name that pops into my head, but someone posted a picture of the contract and it had explicitly stated that which in my mind is saying, "Please enhance yourself as much as physically possible." So, we got to see a lot of crazy characters out of Pride FC. I mean, you see Vanner Lelay Silo fighting there and he's a freaking demon and you know, he had some great fights in there and Over actually looked like he wasn't on anything when he started, but by the end of his uh K1 tenure before he went to the UFC, he was clearly on everything humanly possible and he looked like a totally different person. If you looked at uh Alistar Overing when he excuse me when he first entered uh Pride FC, he was a Dutch kickboxer, very tall, very long, uh was good shape and obviously very effective. He was a great kickboxer and he had a good guillotine choke as well, but he looked nothing like he does or he did at the end of uh his K1 tenure and once he started fighting the UFC, which he became just this enormous caricature of a man like he's just like, you know, lats just extended the shoulders, the traps, everything. So it was very obvious he was taking all sorts of gear. And back then we had what was called their TRT exemption. Like oh because you know your testosterone levels are low. So like he needs to boost them which was a bunch of crap. like anybody who believed that was full of like for again I'm not a doctor or biologist but from my understanding for men there is no baseline testosterone level right um I could be wrong about this but this is what I've heard and read and it makes sense to me every man's testosterone level is different so like they I know I think they say like oh from like 4 to 800 is supposed to be normal But that's across the whole like human spectrum. But normal for me might be 400. Normal for you might be 800. Right? So it's hard to judge like oh well what's your normal if and that's why I felt like if you're going to do this type of thing you would have to get a baseline earlier in life. like maybe a baseline when your your peak teenage years like maybe when you're 17 or whatn not whenever your puberty is going through the roof like to see okay what's like the high level and then in your mid20s like well what's your testosterone then in your 30s so like you could see okay well you know where the testosterone level was when you were a fully grown adult and then if that starts to dip below that you're going to understand okay then I should probably maybe I can make a case for supplementation there. Personally, I would say just live a healthy lifestyle and you shouldn't have an issue. Uh but in any case, uh my point being was that the old Pride FC was basically an enhanced league. All the guys there were basically on gear. Old school UFC, there was obviously a lot of guys in gear. Also, uh, Vtor being one of the prime examples of it. I don't know if everyone was on it, but probably a good amount of people were, and they weren't really testing. When USADA stepped into the picture, it definitely shook things up. We saw Ver Belelffort completely fall off. We saw over change significantly. Uh, and there's a few other notables there. Uh, Johnny Hendris was another guy that just disappeared after being the champion. So, it clearly had an effect, but it didn't remove everything. And just like with any cheating protocol, the cheaters learn how to cheat the system and then the system has to recover and figure out new ways of catching the cheaters. So it's just like with software and hackers, they're always finding new ways to exploit uh bugs in the program in their favor. So it has to constantly be renovating. When the system is not renovating, then you're just letting the hackers run a muck. And I think uh we might have a little bit of that going on right now, at least in my opinion. But if we're just working on the hypothetical here, we have a clean league and then an enhanced league, I think that it would be great. I would probably watch both, although I would care more about the the clean league because to me, that's going to be the true measure of skill because we're not measuring anything else, right? It's not like well what cycle did they take you know and you know what order did they do these things whatever it is that they do right um versus it's just okay let's measure this guy's physical abilities his uh his technical abilities and his will the pure essence of combat right those are the things I want to see when we're doing enhanced things while we're have to weigh in all these other drugs that he's taken in so it's not uh one athlete versus another athlete. It's one athlete and their stack versus another athlete and their stack and let's see who comes out better. I'm not as interested in that. As I said, I'm not a drug user. Never will be. So, I have no I don't care about that. I don't want to measure that, right? I want to measure what I know, which is will technique, you know, and physicality. So, I think the pure league is always going to have more preference and outside of the hypothetical, the cheaters are going to know that and they're going to want to fight in the pure league, right? Um, not a great metaphor for this, but similar. I with the UFC, we have Bellator, we have PFL, we have 1FC, there's all sorts of leagues, and people can make good livingings off fighting off those other leagues outside of the UFC. But at some point of every other athletes career that is not in the UFC, they want to get into the UFC. Why? Because it's the biggest name in the sport. It's the one that holds the most sway. Saying I'm a PFL champion is great, but it doesn't mean anything to anybody who doesn't follow the PFL, which unfortunately is most people. Being a UFC champion, you're a celebrity. Everyone around the world knows who you are and you command that glory, that honor. So, at some point, you're going to want to fight in the UFC, right? And I don't blame him because once you've made enough money now it's about fame and glory that you're after. So the UFC is the next step. I think that a clean league is going to essentially be the same thing. It's going to be the enhanced league is going to be the freak show. It's going to be, you know, oh man, we're going to see some juiced up guys and crazy matches, you know, and that's interesting. But I think people do enjoy purity. Right? Uh even if we talk about uh women, you know, men always want the the the woman who's more chased and or virgin, right? You're not going after the the village bicycle, so to speak. And I think when you talk about your body, it's similar. You know, if somebody is the world champion, but oh yeah, you know, he's taken every drug possible. He's done this, this, and that. You're like, uh, okay, there's an asterisk, right? There's a little asterisk by that name. So, I think the pure league doesn't exist in reality because everybody's going to be trying to cheat it and we basically have to keep trying to filter to remove people who are cheating. It's unfortunate that there's not enough people in combat that have honor, but every sport is like that. Especially once there's money and there's fame involved, people are going to want to uh easy way in and they feel like, well, if I can cheat my way to the top, so be it, right? Nobody's going to care once I've already have all the titles and I've made all the money uh that I'm a cheater, right? Again, a case may be made for Jon Jones, right? He's cheated a bunch of times. He's done a lot of bad things. And he's still one of the greatest of all time. And uh I begrudgingly have to say technically and by will he like when he's fighting, man, he's a force to be reckoned with. But he is a cheater. There is a asterisk to his name, right? It's not clean, you know? It's definitely not clean. And uh his recent shenanigans have definitely muddied the waters a bit of his legacy in my opinion. But he still did everything that he wanted to do. And I think that's a problem with allowing cheaters to like little slaps on the wrist. I believe in harsh penalties. I'm a bit biblical in that sense. I think if you steal, you lose a hand. You steal again, you lose both hands. Stealing is going to be difficult now, right? I I feel Yeah. Oh, it's harsh. But you know what? Nobody else is going to make the same mistake. And if they do, they're kind of silly, right? Like if you know you can lose your hand for stealing a candy bar, are you really going to steal a candy bar? Probably not, right? If you're going to steal, it's probably going to be something really big that it was worth the risk of losing your hand. At least that's what a logical person will do, right? Um, so I believe in harsh penalties and I think people who caught, you know, cheating, whether it's blood doping or, you know, steroids, anything that's against the rules, boom, 5 years suspension. You ruin someone's career that way, which is kind of the point, right? Uh, we don't want people trying to see if they can get by. A year suspension sounds like a lot, but it really isn't because I mean, you know, fighters sometimes fight for like what? Um, especially in a higher level, they're fighting once to two times a year. So, it's not great for them, but a year is not a big layoff. Two, three, four years. Now, that's significant. You're losing you're getting ring rust for sure after a couple years of not fighting and you're losing relevancy. You're losing youth. It's a big problem. 5 years would be the harshest you could I would think. I mean 5 years is significant. You could like I said you could end someone's career right there. Uh potentially. So maybe a little too harsh, but you get what I'm saying. Like it's got to be it's got to be a stiffer penalty. It can't be a slap on the wrist. It has to hurt, right? Uh, and that's the deincentivizer. Long story short, too long, didn't listen to everything. My stance on peeds, I don't like them. I think they shouldn't be allowed. There's four big reasons. One, potential harm short-term and long-term to the athlete themselves. to potential harm to their opponent by the enhanced capabilities that they've earned which they may like in Michael's bisping losing his eye for example to Vtor that was in TRT Vtor or you could even kill somebody right uh so no good three we're adding an additional gatekeeper now which is it's not just about how hard you train or you know your the techniques you train the strategy ies, the coaches you're with. It's also now about your pharmacist. It's about your doctors. The connections you have, the monetary resources to pay for all this makes it prohibitive now for more athletes to be able to get to that top level. And then four, finally, the rules say you can't do it. The rules say you can't do it, you can't do it. Just like I can't eye gouge, I shouldn't be able to cheat. Don't let them do it. on the leagues, a clean league and an enhanced league, I think it's fine, but that only exists in a theoretical realm. We've had enhanced leagues, which was Pride FC and pretty much a lot of fighting in Asia and Japan. They don't really regulate it as much as of the US, it seems. Uh, so we've seen how that looks. It is entertaining, right? But the pure clean leagues are always going to be in my opinion the better leagues because this is more there's no asterisk by your name if you are actually clean right like you got here by your own gumption your own talents your own abilities. You didn't have any unfair advantages that nobody else had. You had to work for it the hard way and in my opinion the right way. Anyhow, hopefully you guys enjoyed that breakdown of my take of PEDs. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to chime in on the comments. Otherwise, I'll see you all next week.