Chris Weidman on Vitor Belfort's testosterone: 'There's something happening'

Chris Weidman

LAS VEGAS – Leading up to UFC 187, Chris Weidman had been fairly quiet about the controversy surrounding Vitor Belfort, testosterone-replacement therapy and a failed drug test that caused their fight to fall through the first time it was set to go down at UFC 173.

When the weigh-ins rolled around, however, Weidman let it be known that he thought there was still something fishy about Belfort’s testosterone ratios after a year away from TRT.

Following his first round destruction of Belfort in the co-main event of UFC 187, which took place on pay-per-view from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Weidman expanded on the issues that led to his decision to break his silence on the issue.

“I left him alone with this whole TRT thing,” Weidman said at the post-fight news conference. “He got caught cheating a couple times. I left him alone throughout the whole camp. I didn’t really want to think about it, but then when I was at the media scrum (ESPN reporter Brett Okamoto) told me that he had called up Nevada and got our tests back. Both of my scores were like 370 and 370 both times, which is on the low side. But this is during training camp and we’re killing ourselves. And this was between two weeks ago and four weeks ago, so it’s in the heat of the training camp.

“His was 500 and 1,200. So, I’m like, ‘All right. This is a guy who needed TRT for his whole life – not his whole life, but for such a long time because he was suffering and he couldn’t live without it. And now, all of a sudden he has four times the amount as me and he’s 10 years older. There’s something that’s happening there.

“And I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was messed up. I just think it was messed up and I told him. It didn’t really bother me when Okamoto told me. I’m like ‘Yeah, I’m going to fight him. Whatever.’ Then when weigh-ins came around, for some reason, I kind of got emotional into it. But when it came down to tonight, I just kind of put it aside and it was just competition.”

Weidman hasn’t been prone to emotional outbursts in the past, so introducing that element could have thrown him off his game heading into a fight with a dangerous knockout puncher like Belfort.

Instead, Weidman was able to take a business-like approach to the fight and pull off a Round 1 TKO after surviving an early scare.

“It was different,” Weidman said. “This was probably the first time where I was emotionally pissed off. So, I had to kind of put it to the side. I wouldn’t say it was difficult, but it was a thought process. This is a fight, it’s just another competition is what I thought. And he said that he passed the tests and he did. I guess they do the level between the epitestosterone and the testosterone and so I think that somehow the level remained normal. Anybody who knows their stuff can probably figure out something there.”

For complete coverage of UFC 187, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

John Morgan, Matt Erickson and Mike Bohn contributed to this story on site in Las Vegas.