Miesha Tate to Jon Jones: You can’t use ignorance as an excuse

Shortly after reclaiming the UFC light heavyweight title with a knockout of Daniel Cormier, Jon Jones failed a USADA-administered drug test and lost that same title. Since then, Jones and his team have maintained that he did not intentionally ingest any banned substances. In the opinion of former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate, however, ignorance is no excuse.

“You’re either clean or you’re not. There is no gray zone when it comes to full contact sports, period,” Miesha Tate said on MMA Tonight on Sirius XM (h/t Bloody Elbow). “I don’t care if USADA says, Miesha, don’t eat Cheerios the week of your fight. Guess what, I ain’t eating Cheerios. That’s the rules. They make it so the sport is safe and clean, and we need to follow them.”

“You know the rules directly ahead of time,” Tate continued. “USADA hands out pamphlets, tons of information. They make it very very easy. If you have a question, if there’s anything that a doctor prescribes you, you have phone numbers, you have a website. You can run it through a number of people to verify if this is a safe product or not.”

“I utilized this many times myself, just [for] precautions. I have a slight thyroid disorder. My thyroid runs a little bit slow. I took a natural pig hormone, but I wanted to make sure that it was safe, it was okay. It was cleared, and it was alright, but I went through the process to make sure that what I was putting into my body — I sent all my supplements to USADA to have them cleared, and they’re happy to do that. And that gives me the reassurance because I don’t want to accidentally take something.”

“But if you’re ‘accidentally’ speeding, and a police officer pulls you over, and said, ‘sorry sir, I was going 20 over, I didn’t realize,’ you’re still going 20 over, period. You can’t use ignorance as an excuse, and it needs to be 100% clean, not basically clean.”

What do you think of these comments from Miesha Tate?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 9/24/2017.