Conor McGregor is influencing fighters to fight past their prime according to a Bellator Champion. Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone recently announced that he was returning to MMA, having retired back in 2022. Cerrone has been very open about his steroid use following his retirement. As it turns out, Bellator Champion Johnny Eblen is not a big fan of fighters who do this.
PEDs are illegal in the fight game and can result in severe bans from the sport. However, when a fighter takes PEDs, and then comes back after flushing it out of their system, it is kind of a loophole in the process.
While the drug flushes itself out of the system, the effects remain for a much longer time. So if you are a trained professional fighter whose best days are long behind them, this becomes quite a bit of a cheat code.
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Fighters can’t do that when they’re active since they constantly get tested but being retired is a great kind of does the trick. In a recent press conference, Eblen blamed Conor McGregor for starting this trend,
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to retire, take a bunch of steroids, and then come back and fight again. It’s not a good look man, I think Conor paved the way and he is influencing a lot of people to do it.”
Eblen called out this process for not being natural. He also made a valid point that no amount of PEDs can reverse CTE or any brain damage caused by fighting. So fighting after a certain age is dangerous no matter what kind of PEDs you take.
Now, McGregor gets called out for something or the other every single day. So, it’s likely Eblen’s words will fall on deaf ears, wasted from a high dosage of the delicious Proper 12.
But he’s not the only one taking the Notorious‘s name. Bellator fighter Paul Hughes recently did the same but for a very different reason.
Hughes wants McGregor for Nurmagomedov fight
Going in as an underdog, Hughes secured a split-decision victory over AJ McKee tonight on the PFL card. Following his fight, he called out the lightweight champion Usman Nurmagomedov.
Along with his call out to the champion, he also asked Conor McGregor to come to corner him when he fights another scion of the Nurmagomedov clan.
“Conor I want you in my corner for that fight. How cool would that be? I mean we might need some extra security that night.”
Given that Khabib might be present in the corner for Usman, this should be a rather tempting offer for the former UFC double champ.
But then again, asking McGregor to help out with extra security might be counter-productive since it’s very likely it’s him, Bellator would need the security for.
