On Marquardt and Sonnen

Besides being caught with elevated testosterone levels, Nate Marquardt and Chael Sonnen also have something else in common: they both claim to be prescribed testosterone by a medical doctor for low testosterone.

Keep in mind this is all assuming that Chael was actually prescribed testosterone for low testosterone, which apparently wasn’t submitted by Paulo Filho.

What is with these young, ridiculously muscular male athletes who happen to (allegedly) have low testosterone. I pump shitloads of iron every day and I’m about as pumped as Nate Diaz. Seriously, I’m eating practically nothing but cottage cheese and Animal Paks.

Whenever you need to know anything about steroids, the best place to look is bodybuilding blogs. Honestly, doctors don’t know shit about steroids because using the way fighters use them is totally illegal and they could never experiment on people the way bodybuilders experiment on themselves.

According to this blog, low testosterone is a side effect of using steroids. In fact, “there are some people who struggle to get testosterone back after even their very first cycle."  Hmm. It’s almost impossible to tell if these guys are telling the truth (not just coming up with a really great excuse) because HIPAA is pretty draconian and bans releasing medical information, so you probably won’t hear from the athletic commission. But let’s assume that they are.

It is possible that these guys cheated for a bunch of years and now can’t produce testosterone on their own. I’m not actually a real doctor, I just play one on the Web, so I can’t opine definitively on the chances of two totally jacked dudes having low testosterone. But it reeks of bullshit.

As far as I can tell, the current rules allow a fighter to get a doctor’s note to juice until his testes disappear between fights as long as his testosterone levels go down to a normal level by fight time.

This is fucking ridiculous and the athletic commissions should be ashamed of themselves if they are allowing it. It’s impossible to know the extent of the issue, given medical privacy laws, but this is something that needs to change.