Jake Paul has hit back at Nate Diaz's claim that he's using steroid ahead of the pair's fight, harkening back to an old drug test issue his rival faced.
The UFC legend will make his boxing debut against YouTuber-turned-boxer Paul in Dallas, Texas on August 5 after years of animosity between the pair, and their trash talking is beginning to heat up. Just this week, Diaz reiterated the debunked claim that Paul has been using performance enhancing drugs, and now Paul has reacted to the accusation.
It has often been suggested, without evidence, that the social media star is using steroids in order to justify his boxing skills after his wins over the likes of Tyron Woodley, Anderson Silva and Ben Askren. But he has always passed any drug tests that have been taken, including full VADA testing for his last bout with Tommy Fury.
Diaz took to Twitter to reinforce the claims on Friday, asking for the pair's eight-round fight to be pushed into a 12-rounder. "12 rounds," Diaz wrote in a post to his 2.2million Twitter followers yesterday. "Ur [sic] on steroids so let’s put that s*** to work."
Paul has hit back, noting that Diaz actually had issues with drug testing before that almost cost him his 2019 Madison Square Garden headliner with Jorge Masvidal. The fighter was almost immediately cleared of any wrongdoing by USADA when his failed drug test was traced back to a plant-based multivitamin.
Diaz is known for his hard public stance against PEDs, infamously accusing the entire UFC roster of being on steroids before his rematch with Conor McGregor in 2016. So he was annoyed when, after going public with his test result before it was released, it was revealed that he would have to have taken 10,000 capsules of the multivitamin to gain any kind of performance-enhancing benefit.
But that didn't stop Paul from rehashing the issue in his response to Diaz's allegation, telling his rival: "You speaking to me Nathan? We haven’t forgotten that you tested positive for steroids. You and your boyfriend Connor [Conor McGregor] are juice heads. Let’s do 15 rounds and see how good those cannabis corroded lungs are. VADA going to be coming to Stockton to slap you up."
Diaz did not, as Paul claims, "test positive for steroids", but in fact had an atypical reading in an out-of-competition USADA test for traces of LGD-4033, or Ligandrol, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM) which builds lean muscle mass, two weeks before his fight with Masvidal and was fully exonerated just days later.
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In a 2019 ruling by USADA, the UFC were permitted to reinstate fighters who have tested for less than 100 picograms/mL of certain substances, noting that you couldn't gain a competitive edge from such trace amounts that can get in your system as a result of taking a tainted supplement.
“There’s nothing guesswork about the Nate Diaz case," said Jeff Novitzky, UFC VP of Athlete Health and Performance, at the time. "It is as rock solid evidence as I’ve ever seen in the history of my anti-doping career when it comes to a contaminant.
"To say he did anything wrong, you’d have to say, ‘You did something wrong by choosing a plant-based, vegan, organic multivitamin that said on the label they were lab tested.’ Somebody can say he did something wrong on that? It’s a shame if they would. The guy did nothing wrong.”
As for Paul's insinuation that Conor McGregor has used steroids in the past, there is no evidence that such a thing has happened and he has passed every USADA test he has ever taken.
