Conor McGregor ‘took powerful, banned drugs’ and ‘tried to evade’ anti-doping officials, it has been claimed.
The UFC’s star attraction, who returns to action for the first time in five years against Max Holloway on July 12th, dropped out of the testing pool for two years after shattering his leg in 2021.
According to a New York Times investigation, two people confirmed that anti-doping officials learned McGregor, now 37, had taken banned substances prior to being reinstated in the testing programme.
McGregor sustained a horrendous and complicated break to his tibia and fibula in a defeat by Dustin Poirier that required a rod, plates and screws being inserted into his leg.
The surgeon who operated on him is renowned specialist Neal ElAttrache, who has helped Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and dozens of other A-list celebrities.
ElAttrache wrote a letter supporting McGregor’s application for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) that would allow the Irishman to use banned substances to aid his recovery without being punished by the UFC.
Conor McGregor, seen in a photo he recently shared on Instagram, is due to return to the cage shortly after his current ban expires having missed drugs tests
When asked why he thought that course of action was the right one to take, he said: ‘You are acting as if banned drugs are somehow illegal drugs or that they have no legitimate therapeutic use and only have performance enhancement use,’ he told the investigation.
‘There are many banned drugs on the list which are necessary to medically treat various conditions which occur in people. That is why a therapeutic use exemption application exists.’
He also said he was not involved in McGregor’s evaluation by the consultant expert in bone healing or with prescribing medications. It has not been confirmed or denied that McGregor was given an exemption by the UFC or USADA.
USADA believed McGregor was ‘trying to exploit a loophole to use the banned substances’, according to the New York Times’ two sources who also claimed he ‘engaged in an active effort to evade scrutiny from anti-doping officials’. The alleged substances have not been specified.
It was then that the ‘Notorious’, who shot to fame and fortune as a two-weight UFC champion before translating that success into a fortune exceeding £500million in business ventures, dropped out of the USADA testing pool altogether in 2022.
During this time, fellow UFC fighters and the UFC’s long-time commentator Joe Rogan suggested McGregor might be using performance-enhancing drugs after he posted regular photos of himself looking bulked-up on social media.
Rogan said McGregor looked as though his urine ‘would melt that USADA cup’, adding ‘the weird thing is that there’s a loophole in USADA that allows you to get out of the testing pool. You could just juice up.’
Former light-heavyweight UFC contender Anthony Smith posted on X: ‘There’s only one reason you would do that’, referring to leaving the testing pool.
He added: ‘You keep seeing videos of him flexing in front of mirrors and screaming, and he’s huge. He’s healed really fast. Like, really fast.’
McGregor responded: ‘When a serious injury with a high % of never recovering occurs, it is just simply not the same. The % of the bones joining back after a break like this is so low.
McGregor broke his leg in a defeat by Dustin Poirier back in 2021 and hasn’t fought since
‘Everything was fully disclosed before I began. The state of allowance for athletes to recover from injuries as horrific as the one I overcame must be assessed.’
McGregor then deleted his posts.
When the New York Times’ accusations were put to McGregor’s manager Audie Attar, he replied that McGregor withdrew from the testing pool to ‘focus fully on his recovery under the care of “his team of world-renowned physicians’.
He added: ‘It is an unfathomable breach of health and privacy protections that my client’s purported personal medical records would be disclosed.’
Attar also claimed the injury was so serious there had been a chance McGregor would never walk again.
UFC CBO Hunter Campbell insisted McGregor acted ‘in full compliance with the rules of our comprehensive drug program’.
The UFC have long been praised for taking seriously the issue of performance-enhancing drugs and employed USADA to oversee their testing from 2015.
They chose to cut ties with USADA in 2023, announcing simultaneously that October that McGregor was back in the testing pool and that the relationship with the anti-doping agency would be severed.
The UFC then created their own drug-testing program that McGregor then fell foul of.
On June 29 last year, the UFC’s anti-doping officials tried to find McGregor but were not able to and he missed two more tests three months later.
That violation of the rules led to him being banned for 18 months, reduced from two years because he was recovering from injury.
And the 18-month suspension was back-dated, ending this month, which means he is free to make his long-awaited comeback against Holloway at UFC 329 on July 12.
