gee i wonder why If Jones' car runs out of fuel he can take a tinkle into the tank and it will probably go faster than before
It's nebulous due to depth of different divisions as well as what era as the sport hass evolved quickly over a short period of time. I tend to look at reign and quality of opposition, and you can't compare fighters now to 20 years ago as it would be like comparing boxers now from a 100 years ago, it's complicated and multi variable. So I would throw out some names who are in the conversation. Fedor at Heavy. Honerable mention Cain. Jones at Light Heavy- Long reign but 7 years of inactivity due to various bans and lay offs, should have been better. Silva at Middle- I remember his fight with Franklin to win the belt, it was a brutal beat down, sometimes he messed about other times he just clowned the opposition. His fight at Light Heavy against former champ Griffen took the ****, Griffen didn't land a single glove on Silve who was literally in the matrix in that fight. GSP at Welter- Long reign in a deep division-GSP beat guys at their own game whether that was striking or wrestling. Kamara and Hughes are honerable mentions. Khabib or PJ Penn at Lightweight- Tricky one as being a deep division nobody has reigned and dominated like the the people listed above, both men were beasts in their respective primes, yeah PJ fell of a cliff, but still went up to Welter and wrecked Hughes who was a beast at Welter and top 3 in that division all time. Aldo at Feather although Volk is catching him- Aldo was an elite striker and just wrecked people in his prime piecing dudes up, long reign in a deep division. Cruz or Dillashaw- Cruz edges it but had a lot of time out due to injuries, Dillashaw although a bit of a dick was a great fighter. Demetrious at Flyweight- Overlooked a little due to lack of depth but Demetrious was a well rounded fighter who always found a way to win.
When people say GOAT some are thinking resumes and some just go off of who was the best at their peak. I go by who was the most unstoppable while at their best combined with the opponents they defeated. Prime Fedor is still to this day the best MMA fighter the world has seen. And he never got popped for PED’s. Case closed. GSP is a close 2nd
That's not how PED's work. There are Olympic weightlifters that are juiced to the gills who have less muscle mass than Fedor for instance. Not all PED's are steroids, and not all PED's make you look like Overeem. Fedor, like 90% of athletes, was 110% on PED. Idk why people get defensive about this. It's literally a level playing field, especially in his promotions at the time. It's physiologically impossible for a clean athlete to compete against a similarly talented PED using athletes, and it's psychologically unlikely to the point of virtual impossibility for one of the most competitive human beings on the planet to not take PED's when Pride literally said in their contract that they don't test for them. Imagine if your boss said that you'd get paid exactly the same and continue to get raises regardless of whether or not you show up for work, and then explicitly said in your contract that they don't check if you show up or not. Would you work a 9-5 anyway? **** no.
1. I sent a massive series of posts to someone else about PEDs. What evidence would you need to be convinced that Fedor took PED's? Full disclosure, the answer "a failed drug test" is invalid, because we know that they are extraordinarily easy to pass and that passing them doesn't mean you're clean. Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test. Most athletes that get busted never do. Armstrong also took a ridiculous amount of steroids and growth hormone btw. Like I said, not having big muscles doesn't mean anything. 2. Trying to prove to someone that (likely) knows nothing about sports science, sports statistics, sports biochemistry, sports physiology, sports psychology etc that all top level professional athletes use PED's is an impossible task. In addition to requiring a foundation of knowledge that you don't have, there's also a lot of misinformation and sentimental nonsense to deal with that one doesn't have to do for other subjects. For instance, I know for an absolute fact that Usain Bolt took PED's, but to someone that doesn't know anything about them this is a controversial statement, when in reality it's just basic, and I do mean basic inductive reasoning and statistics. Similarly, it's biologically impossible for a healthy and talented clean athlete to beat a healthy and comparably talented PED using athlete. Performance enhancing drugs wouldn't be named as such if they didn't enhance performance. So I'm not really even sure what proof I could give you outside of the entire history of PEDs in sport, drug testing and the biochemistry of performance lol. I'm not trying to be rude btw, you're one of my favourite posters. It's just that most sports fans aren't sports nerds. Not really interested in sports science AND have been fed a ridiculous amount of disinformation regarding PED's. Saying basic **** like weight training makes you stronger or no one is "naturally" 30%-40% body fat, Fury and Ruiz are just overweight is controversial around here. Hell, most people on this website didn't even know that a standard barbell weighed 20kg, yet they're knowledgeable enough about training and performance to have ideas about who is and isn't on drugs lol.
All I know is that he never failed a test and therefore I'm not going to accept that he used without proof. In my view while peds can obviously increase performance they are not a magic bullet. Take for example Helenius failing his PED test and losing to AJ recently.
Helenius all things being equal is much worse than AJ, AND AJ is also on PED's lol so mute point. And a single PED isn't a magic bullet, but athletes don't tell singles. They cycle different drugs on and off throughout the year. That's the difference between being washed at 33 and being washed at 38, or merely qualifying for the Olympics and winning medals.
Yes AJ is clean, Fedor was clean, only people who get popped are using PEDs and the tooth fairy is real.
I love your PED-related posts, you seem to really know your stuff here....and basically reinforce my long-held suspicions about many athletes. Despite this Fedor (and CroCop) are my all-time favourites.
Thank you very much, I'm glad someone appreciates them! I'm very interested in sports science, if I'm being honest I'm probably more interested in sports science than in the sports themselves, and PED's are one of those elephants in the room that you can't ignore after you study it for awhile. That interest, combined with a healthy amount of scientific skepticism + hearing all the scandals repeating themselves + not thinking of athletes as folk heroes + listening to athletes when they tell you they take PED's = you casually discover a lot of things that people don't like hearing. And yeah Fedor is a beast. The mad man only retired this year, at 47! And I wouldn't be surprised if he came back.
A few examples if you're in for a read. I might have mentioned some of these already: 1. Around 04-05, a very popular and very powerful stimulant was introduced in the track and field world. 2. Jamaica's anti-doping agency, JADCO, basically didn't exist at this time, a fact that was discovered in 2013 and it was so bad that every single JADCO board member resigned, and Jamaica was almost banned from the 2016 Olympics outright. 3. Before 2004, the fastest man (accross 100m) in Jamaican history was not even one of the top 30 fastest people of all time. And finally... 4. From 2005-2012, AFTER the emergence of this new stimulant and BEFORE they were exposed, Jamaica, one of the smallest countries on the planet, went from not having a single man in the top 30 to having BOTH of the two fastest people of all time, 4 of the 5 fastest people of all time and 5 of the 8 fastest people of all time Then surprise surprise, 4 of those 5 people (in addition to 8 of the top 10) have since tested positive for drugs, with the only person that didn't being by far the fastest, most profitable and most important. Basketball example, HGH is so common in the NBA that the President of the NBA Player Association and NBA Player Union straight up asked the commissioner of the NBA if they could take Human Growth Hormone off the banned substance list There is also absolutely zero out of competition drug testing, they're all told when they're going to be drug tested in season and the punishment for testing positive is being suspended for less than a quarter of the season. Several former extremely high profile NBA players have also talked openly about how they used PED's. Immediately after the 1998 Football World Cup, every single drug sample was destroyed. Every single one, before they could even be tested. In recent years there have also been Premier League players that failed drug tests and received zero punishments. They weren't even suspended, literally nothing happened to them. The league just said they had exemptions for them and didn't talk about it again. Diego Maradona tested positive for PED's multiple times ffs. Hell, the MLB, the sports league that's notorious for having had huge PED rings doesn't even test for HGH right now. They didn't even test for it until 2012 and then stopped testing for it in again as of 2020. Only an ignoramus would now say that the burden of proof is on ME to prove that MLB players use HGH. The league notorious for drug busts doesn't test for one of the most popular and powerful performance enhancing drugs available and people are naive enough to say that I don't know if they're taking it, unless they tell me? I've gone out of my way several times to list multiple, massive, repeating scandals in several of the biggest sports around the world, whilst also showing that they've been going for decades, only to be told that Occamz Razor suggests nobody is on drugs Seriously. Imagine this hypothetical scenario; You're in a school where if you pass your exams you get rewarded millions of dollars. Your official school policy says you're not allowed to cheat in exams. However, the school policy also says that even though you're not allowed to cheat in exams, there will be absolutely ZERO cheating controls. Not only will nobody check if you cheat, but nobody would be capable of checking that you cheated even if they wanted to. You're also told that pretty much all students before you, especially all the best students before you have cheated anyway, that punishment for cheating is extremely minor, definitely won't affect your exam score and also won't affect your reputation amongst students. There's not a single ****in person alive that would think the average student ISN'T cheating in this hypothetical, nor is there a single person that wouldn't cheat if they were put in that scenario themselves, everything we know about human psychology and sociology dictates one would cheat in these conditions. Yet all of a sudden you change the word "student" for "baseball player" or "football player" and now it's completely unreasonable to make assumptions unless I have specific evidence about every single individual athlete
