Two months ago Yoel Romero was a fighter on the rise. He just defeated Ronaldo Souza in a title eliminator contest at the heavily watched UFC 194 card.
This win put himself in perfect position to challenge middleweight champion Luke Rockhold.
Romero is a silver medalist at the Olympics in freestyle wrestling, an athletic freak show and contains enough power to scare any man across all divisions. Romero is riding a seven-fight win streak with his last three wins over top five contenders Souza, Lyoto Machida and Tim Kennedy.
As we sit here today Romero has seen his rapid rise come to a complete free-fall. Last month Romero was red flagged by the USADA for testing positive for a prohibited substance.
“Given that Mr. Romero has publicly discussed his case, we can confirm that he did test positive for a prohibited substance,” USADA rep reported to mmajunkie.com.
This Monday Romero and his manager Malki Kawa spoke about the issue.
“What basically happened was, he took a certain supplement after his fight that was contaminated. It had an illegal substance in it,” said Kawa.
“He provided USADA with the supplement he took. When you read the label, it’s a natural supplement, it’s supposed to be as clean as possible. It’s something anyone can take. If everything on the label would have been in there, we wouldn’t be here. This particular supplement was contaminated with the product he failed for.”
“He did take the supplement,” Kawa said. “If you take a supplement, you run the risk of this happening. The responsibility does fall on Yoel.”
“I think it’s my responsibility when I take something. But, I think maybe a public warning [would be a fair punishment]. I don’t know. … nobody knows. When you see the supplement, outside it says it’s clean, you can take it,” Romero told Ariel Helwani.
It is also important to remember that there is a full and fair legal process to handle the adjudication of any case, and all athletes are provided full due process before any decision is reached in regards to this failed test.
The question we should be asking ourselves is what’s the the proper punishment if this turns out to be true.
Did he inject an illegal substance? No. Did he take an anabolic steroid? No.
He simply just went to a normal GNC to get his supplements which were labelled clean and ended up having a banned substance inside.
The UFC is partially to blame here as Romero is now labelled a cheater and getting destroyed by fans. The UFC originally brought this information to public before actually knowing the full story from Romero and his team.
Maybe we could see USADA and the fighters work together more in the future. Maybe creating their own supplements to provide the fighters? This issue is very damaging for a fighter’s career and life outside fighting. It is not hard to start up a supplement company nowadays, if you haven’t noticed.
There was a study shown last year that 20 per cent of all supplements actually contain what they advertise on their bottles. We can’t have our fighters miss out on their careers over complications like this.
I do believe that Romero should be held accountable for his actions because he should know that you can never be to sure what’s in these supplements.
But a lengthy suspension and years without being able to provide for his family seems completely out of line. A harsh fine and a program to work with USADA more closely in the future seems like the appropriate punishment for Romero.
Going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
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