Wanderlei Silva is back once again with another video, reiterating a false claim regarding the punishment handed to him by the Nevada Athletic Commission last year.
This time piggybacking off of the situation with Nick Diaz and that ridiculous five-year ban, Silva questioned aloud how they could try to ban him when he’s never tested positive for anything, and then vowed not to fight in Nevada ever again.
“It’s all very cloudy and unclear,” Silva said in the video. “One guy gets one year, the other gets two years. I had to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m spending a lot of money with lawyers to defend myself.
“I’ve never tested positive for anything. I was always a clean fighter and they want to ban me from the sport. How does that work? But to look on the bright side of the Nick Diaz situation, I think finally our class woke up to the fact that it can happen to anyone. We even have Olympic champions supporting the cause. Many athletes came forward refusing to fight in the state of Nevada. I support this movement. I also will not fight again in the state of Nevada.”
Penick’s Analysis: Given his formative years were spent in an organization (Pride) that did not test for steroids at all, it’s not the least bit surprising that he hasn’t tested positive in the past. Of course, that’s irrelevant to his current situation, because the entire point of his suspension is because he didn’t comply with the testing which could have found something in his system. It’s hard to test positive if you skip out on the test. His situation is only similar to Diaz’s in that the commission went overboard in their punishment and away from their own guidelines regarding the respective situations. From there, Diaz’s was probably more egregious because he has evidence of negative tests for marijuana from a WADA-accredited lab within hours of the outlying positive for which he received punishment. That they ignored that evidence in favor of that which went against him is the crux of the case to overturn their decision. Silva’s still going to receive some sort of punishment from them despite the court ruling, and he’ll be continuing his fight in court, where it’s likely to be found that they had jurisdiction to test him because of the fact that he had a fight scheduled and had done promotion for the bout, whether he’d gotten his license yet or not.
(h/t: BloodyElbow.com)
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