Flyweight Matheus Nicolau's story behind a positive drug test

Flyweight Matheus Nicolau had just picked up his computer on a Thursday when he read an email he said felt like being hit by a bucket of cold water.

Earlier that day, Nicolau (12-1-1 MMA, 2-0 UFC) had sparring at the famed Jackson-Wink Academy, where he’d traveled to get world-class training for a meeting with Ulka Susaki (19-3-2 MMA, 2-2 UFC) in his native Brazil. But according to the message, his career was about to take a major turn.

From what he could pick out, the email, which was in English, said he’d been flagged for a prohibited substance: anastrozole. The fight, scheduled for the FS1-televised UFC Fight Night 100, was going to be canceled. He was provisionally suspended.

More shocking, the whole world seemed to know. As he read the email, the news popped up on his social media feeds and on the UFC’s website.

“At first I didn’t even understand,” Nicolau told MMAjunkie. “I didn’t even believe it much. I don’t speak English incredibly well; I read it in English and I understood what it was, but I immediately texted my manager: ‘Is this really it, a prohibited substance, (and) how so?’ I didn’t even believe it. It was like, I can’t believe I’m reading this.”

After a few days of trying to figure out how he’d arrived at this point, he reached out to the UFC and its anti-doping partner USADA for answers. What he found made him feel a little bit better about his chances of returning to a normal career. But it also left him with more unsettling questions.

According to the UFC and USADA, he said, only a trace amount of the drug had been found in his system. The amount was not consistent with someone looking to enhance performance.

Not only that, he said, but the timeline of his tests didn’t add up to someone looking to cheat. He had been tested for a fight with John Moraga at The Ultimate Fighter 23 Finale, and there wasn’t enough time for his levels to get as low as they were by the Oct. 11 out-of-competition test for UFC Fight Night 100.

“They say this is consistent with traces of contamination,” Nicolau said. “We have our suspicions of some supplements, but it’s very hard to think of everything I took recently – every little thing. None of the supplements have this substance. It was never prescribed to me. My doctor is very cautious with that; he always reads the lists of banned substances that come out every year.”

It appeared as though he had a good shot at reducing any potential suspension, if not getting free of one. So, he signaled he would appeal USADA’s findings, becoming the latest in a line of fighters who claim tainted supplements caused them to test positive for banned substances.

The subsequent news wasn’t positive. The B sample of his positive test predictably came back positive for the same substance, though that’s extremely common in these cases. He now plans to send in all of his supplements to have them tested for anastrozole.

“I’m working with the worst case scenario, which is one year,” said Nicolau, citing USADA’s penalty for drug failure caused by a specific substance. “I’m very hopeful that we will be able shorten it, since we have everything in our favor, the way that everything happened is consistent with not having used this substance with performance enhancing purposes. But I also try not to create expectations to avoid frustration. I’m focused on making the best defense possible and making the right moves as the answers come.”

Before his current predicament, Nicolau always cast a sideways glance at fighters who used the same defense. Now, he has a different outlook.

“I don’t know the particular aspects of other cases – the amounts found and all – but in my case I’m very certain of what I’ve been doing, so it really made me re-think my previous judgments,” he said. “Like, maybe he isn’t lying, maybe it was simply tainted. And it’s kind of a cliche saying you took tainted things, and it’s something many people say, but my only suspicion is supplement contamination. Because I didn’t even take any medicine in the two-month period prior to the test, so really a tainted supplement is our No. 1 suspicion.”

At the same time, Nicolau wonders if he’ll really be cleared by the process. If the arbitration panel hired by USADA finds he didn’t knowingly cheat, will it make much of a difference to the fans?

“Hopefully people who get how this sport works will understand and won’t point fingers,” he said. “In spite of everything, my conscience is clean. Even on the very day I got the e-mail, I went to bed and within two minutes of resting my head against the pillow, I fell asleep. My conscience was clean. And that helps me out a lot. When people talk to me, and see me talking openly, honestly, clearly, about the case – even if they have judged me – they might change their minds.”

But then there’s the question of how Nicolau is supposed to ever feel safe doing what he was doing before. In his mind, supplements are indispensable to a career in MMA, and he’s far from alone in that belief.

“My concern right now is not just putting together my defense and getting a shorter suspension, though, of course, the shorter the suspension the better,” Nicolau said. “More than the concern with my defense and showing everyone that I didn’t use a performance enhancing drug and I didn’t try to cheat, my biggest concern is with the future.

“I’m a high performance athlete and I need supplements to fight. How am I going to live for fighting and train at a high level eating rice and beans? I need supplements. That’s my concern, because I’ve always been careful with that, I’ve always gone to the doctor. I’ve been with my doctor for a long time, even before the UFC, so we see eye to eye on the way we work. And it was something that we didn’t expect and took us completely by surprise. So now my concern is: How am I going to protect myself from having this happen to me in the future?”

The answer to that question isn’t entirely clear. Nicolau is trying to be patient while the process plays out. He is back in Brazil, trying to make ends meet by teaching martial arts. He continues to train, but not the way one does when preparing for a UFC fight. Everything is on pause.

“I think I still have a long road ahead of me, and the older we get, our time gets more and more precious,” he said. “Not that I have time to waste, but I’ll use this as a hurdle that I’ll get through to make me that much better in the future. Since it happened now, that’s better. I can use this experience to keep it from happening again. Could be worse, it could have happened in a title shot, if you can imagine that. So I need to use this to learn and turn it into focus to become the best mixed martial artist I can be.”

For more on UFC Fight Night 100, check out the UFC Events section of MMAjunkie.