These things happen in MMA.
Only hours after the news broke that top UFC star and FS1 fight analyst Chael Sonnen had failed an out-of-competition drug test, Dana White and Chael Sonnen were special guests on FS1's Pregame show. Here's what they had to say.
"My reaction isn't shock," Dana White said. "This has been lingering. This stuff was legal. TRT was legal, then the Nevada State Athletic Commission said it's illegal now, it's gotta go away, but there's gonna be effects of stopping this thing cold turkey. It just doesn't work that way.
"I wish that the commission never let anybody use TRT, and when it went away, they didn't do a very good job of figuring out how to get these guys off of it. When you get off it, you don't just go cold turkey. There's things you've got to do. If you don't take these estrogen blockers, they can get side effects from it. Chael Sonnen is at a point in his life, in his career, where he got married, he's trying to have children. He was on medicine to get fertile and have a baby, and his wife is now pregnant so it worked. This is between Chael and the commission, but the rules should've been laid out better when they said ‘that's it, it's over.'
"Both are at fault," the UFC President said. "I think the Nevada State Athletic Commission could've laid it out better for how they were going to end this thing, what would be banned and what wouldn't be banned for the guys coming down off it. Again, it's a matter of, they're not very educated on TRT. It's the thing that's made this whole thing impossible.
"Anyway, it's Chael fault too because Chael should've called the athletic commission and said, ‘this is what my doctor told me I need to do to come down off this stuff, so here's what I'm taking.' He absolutely should've done that."