Shortly after his history-making defeat of Stipe Miocic, UFC heavyweight and light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier called out Brock Lesnar. Lesnar then lumbered into the cage for a heated encounter with Cormier, complete with bravado, profanity, shoving — all the ingredients for an awesome promo.
https://twitter.com/UFCEurope/status/1015818405805342721
Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that Cormier will indeed fight Lesnar in the future. Unfortunately, it sounds like we will have to wait a little while before these two giants of the combat sports world step into the Octagon together.
To remind, Brock Lesnar was handed a year-long suspension after he failed a drug test in the fallout of his UFC 200 defeat of Mark Hunt. As a result, Lesnar’s win was ruled a no contest, and he was handed a year-long suspension by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Shortly thereafter Lesnar “retired” from MMA, leaving his USADA suspension half-completed. In order to fight again, he’ll have to re-enter the USADA testing pool, and serve the final six-ish months of his suspension.
By the time all of this has run it’s course, it will be at least January. Dana White confirmed this reality post-fight, per Marc Raimondi of MMA Fighting.
As Dana White confirmed just now, Brock Lesnar could not fight in the UFC until around January due to his USADA suspension. #UFC226
— Marc Raimondi (@marc_raimondi) July 8, 2018
Of course, Lesnar will also have to pass a battery of new drug tests before he can actually fight Cormier. In fact, Cormier implied post-fight that he won’t fight Lesnar unless the hulking pro wrestler passes tests administed by USADA, and perhaps even a second agency as well.
“Brock’s gotta be clean,” Cormier said at the UFC 226 post-fight press conference (via MMAJunkie). “I’m not going to fight him if he’s not clean. We’ll do USADA testing, and we’ll do other testing.”
“We’ll do testing above USADA to make sure this man’s clean,” Cormier added. “Because I’m not going to fight this man if he’s cheating. I’ve done that a number of times already.”
Who do you think will come out on top when the cage door closes on Daniel Cormier and Brock Lesnar?
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 7/8/2018.