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Intersting theroy about why some pride fighters are having problems in the UFC.
From strictlymma
The Elephant in the UFC’s Yard: It won’t fit in the room anymore because it’s on HGH
Written by Mark Davies
When stars from the former Pride Fighting Championships cross over into the UFC it should be easier to predict the outcomes of their fights than it is to predict the outcomes of matches involving other newcomers. Most serious fans have seen Cro Cop fight 10-20 times so it should be simpler to figure out how he will fare against UFC fighters than it is to guess how a relative newcomer like Jeff Monson or Pe De Pano will do right? Well no it hasn’t been.
When you have seen a fighter face Ricardo Arona, Rampage, Yoshida, Sakuraba, Dan Henderson, Cro Cop, and Mark Hunt you should have a good idea of how he will fare in his American re-debut right? Especially if he is rematching a fighter he already beat right?
When you have watched a 6'5 250 lb monster conquer Igor Vovchanchyn, Tom Erikson, Mark Kerr, and Gan McGee a bout with Jake O’Brien should hold no surprises right? Or a heavyweight who we’ve seen face Sergei Kharitonov, Alistair Overeem, Aleks Emelianenko, Gabriel Gonzaga and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.
Despite the acres of available empirical evidence most educated prognosticators were dead wrong with regards to how each of the above-referenced Pride superstars performed in their United States debuts. This has led to legions of UFC fanboys disputing the widely held notion of Pride’s superiority. Unwilling to accept that Pride had inferior fighters I cast about for an answer to this riddle.
What MMA mastermind should we turn to for a solution to this conundrum? What boxing-blending brainiac can solve this quandary and set us back on the path to accurate predictions? For me the solution to at least some of these strange performances lies with one of the many Olympians Pride recruited to beat the dead horse that is proving one-art fighters can’t win. I refer of course to Judo legend Pawel Nastula.
If you’ll recall Nastula tested positive for performance enhancing drugs after Pride’s first United States show. His defense was brilliant in its simplicity. “Pride said I could” was the gist of it. After several clarifications it became clear that, when he was negotiating his contract, Nastula inquired as to Pride’s steroid testing policy and was told there was none and he was free to do as he pleased. The implications of this anecdotal evidence were confirmed when 40% of the fighters tested on that show registered a violation of some sort. That round of testing, when viewed through the already steroid soaked prism of modern MMA, combined with Nastula’s telling admission, would be more than enough to prove to most people that steroid use in Pride was rampant. But there’s more.
In recent years the frequency and length of injury suspensions has contributed to limiting most elite UFC fighters to 2-3 fights per year. The top guys were already fighting this schedule because long matches against elite opposition were inflicting so many injuries that fighting more often was begging for serious injury. Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell have not fought more than three times in a year since 2001. Part of that is the UFC’s scheduling but prior to the TUF era the UFC had a vested interest in getting their cash cows on PPV as often as possible.
In the last few years, three of the UFC’s last four heavyweight champions have missed significant time with injuries. Tim Sylvia had back surgery, Andre Arlovski badly injured his leg in the third Sylvia fight and Ricco Rodriguez has been battling a knee injury that, for several years, reduced his ability to do anything other than sit on the couch and eat.
At light heavyweight the stats are not quite as bad but Tito, Ken Shamrock, and Randy Couture all missed significant time or lost major fights due to injury. At the lighter weights Rich Franklin was badly hurt in a dominant victory over David Louiseau, Martin Kampman is in the middle of a layoff that will stretch past six months due to a knee injury, Karo lost his title shot to injury, and Diego, BJ, Franca, and many others are all on the list of those hit hard by training or fighting injuries.
Pride has had its share of injuries also, Fedor’s right hand notably, but they seem to be fewer and farther apart. When you factor in the greater length of Pride fights, more dangerous rules, more frequent fights, and more frequent competitive fights it seems counterintuitive that Pride fighters should be able to fight more often than their UFC counterparts. We know from Hermes Franca (and reams of scientific data) that steroids let you train and fight when you otherwise could not. There may be another excuse for the superior durability of Pride fighters but none comes to mind. It should be noted that Pride was much more callous about “encouraging” fighter to fight injured than the UFC.
Wanderlei Silva fought six times in 14 months. Silva took heavy damage against Quinton Jackson and Mark Hunt and also fought two long battles with Ricardo Arona. Even his relatively easy matches were against top 10 fighters Hidehiko Yoshida and Kazuhiro Nakamura. Was Silva just very lucky to come through all those fights without serious injury? The same question could be asked about Rampage who fought Chuck, Silva, Bustamente and Randleman in a six-fight 2003. That was the norm for Pride fighters. How is it possible that most Pride fighters could fight more frequent, tougher fights than their UFC counterparts? Please note that because I am using these two as examples it does not mean I believe they are users.
If that’s not enough for you consider the post-Pride positives of fighters like Phil Baroni and Royce Gracie, the accusations leveled at Pride fighters by insiders like Juanito Ibarra and the evidence becomes overwhelming that Pride was an extremely steroid-friendly environment. The difficulty for Pride fighters who have been using steroids, and only the excessively credulous would deny there must be more than a few, is that they haven’t had to conceal their use before. The fighters that have been in the UFC and may be using have experience beating drug tests but the Pride fighters are in a whole new world. They may have to cycle off or try different drugs than what they have used in the past and body chemistry is a dangerous thing to play with, just ask Mark Kerr.
I should be clear that I am not casting aspersions on any specific fighter and there is no single one that I look at and think “he is, or was, on the juice”, although Rampage’s camp has all but accused Wanderlei Silva, and I think one or more of the Pride fighter upsets can be attributed to circumstances and the general unpredictability of MMA but this is what I know. The Wanderlei Silva that fought in Pride is a better 205 lb fighter than Dan Henderson. The Heath Herring that fought in Pride is a better fighter than Jake O’Brien, the Cro Cop that fought in Pride is a better fighter than Gabriel Gonzaga and five times the fighter Cheick Kongo is, and the Fabricio Werdum that fought in Pride and elsewhere is much better than he showed against Andre Arlovski.
Right now this is just a trend. Its similar to when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were both on pace to break Roger Maris’ record at the All-Star break in 1998 or when the East German Olympic team first took a medal haul far beyond what their population would seem to merit.
If these upsets of Pride fighters continue at some point the inevitable conclusion must be drawn and that conclusion is that some of these fighters are likely losing because they have had to abandon certain parts of their pre-fight regimens. If Mark Coleman, Aleks Emelianenko and Kevin Randleman couldn’t muscle Cro Cop around then why can Gabriel Gonzaga and Cheick Kongo? If superior wrestlers like Tom Erikson and Mark Kerr couldn’t control Heath Herring on the ground then why can Jake O’Brien.
There are a lot of legit reasons that would explain these seeming inconsistencies, Cro Cop half-assing his training for Gonzaga and Heath hurting his knee, just like new training methods and legal supplements were reasonable explanations for the larger more defined physiques sported by Jay Gibbons, Jason Giambi, and dozens of others. At some point we are going to have to stop giving fighters the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know if we have reached that point yet but we are getting close.
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