Surprisingly, no fights were announced over the last three days in any of the major promotions. Instead, we’ll be talking the biggest story of late last week, which was the final ruling of Anderson Silva’s failed drug test for UFC 183 from earlier this year. Silva defeated Nick Diaz in the main event of UFC 183 in a five round unanimous decision. Both fighters failed their drug tests, with Silva having failed for drostanolone and androstane, both anobolic steroids, while Diaz shockingly failed for marijuana metabolytes. Due to the test failures, the result of SIlva’s victory was overturned into a no contest. Back to the present, Silva plead his case, claiming the steroids got into his system via tainted sexual enhancement supplement, but the commission wasn’t buying it. Instead, they voted unanimously to suspend the former UFC Middleweight Champion and pound-for-pound great for the maximum first time offender punishment of a full calendar year, retroactively dating back to the January 31st date of the UFC 183 bout. Silva is currently 40 years old and will be just two and a half months shy of his 41st birthday by the time his suspension is up. “The Spider” was once viewed as the greatest fighter on the planet, and perhaps the greatest fighter of all time, but this steroid cloud has a good chance of tarnishing all of his tremendous accomplishments from his near six and a half year undefeated streak and overall six year title reign. There’s no confirmation on whether or not Silva will even want to compete again once his suspension is over. Perhaps he’ll want one last fight to try to salvage some good faith from his fans or the rest of the MMA community, but it’ll be a hard sell at this point. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens from here on out.
