Gordon Ryan felt like he didn’t have a choice but to respond to Mikey Musumeci.
During UFC 310 media day ahead of his Fight Pass Invitational grappling debut, Musumeci said performance enhancing drugs are a major issue in jiu-jitsu, and that “99 percent” of the sport’s athletes are on them — including Ryan.
Ryan issued a heated response, calling Musumeci a “dork,” and said that steroids aren’t illegal. During a scrum on Saturday, Ryan explained his reasoning for clapping back at Musumeci.
“I woke up and he was just attacking me,” Ryan said. “I’ve trained with Mikey before and we’ve always been nice to one another, and I actually talked pretty positively about him on [The Joe Rogan Experience] when I was on there, and I’ve never had anything against Mikey, but he always has my name in his rants about steroids and things like that.
“He’ll say my name, then he’ll be like, ‘These guys aren’t athletes,’ or, ‘These guys are mentally weak,’ or whatever the case is. So I let it go for a while and he just kept on attacking me and attacking me, so I was like, ‘OK, if we’re going to play that game, let’s play that game.’”
While Ryan doesn’t appreciate how Musumeci continues to go about saying there’s PED issues in jiu-jitsu, he actually does agree with his fellow former ONE Championship competitor. It’s just not the same reasoning from Ryan’s perspective.
“The main issue right now with taking performance enhancers out of jiu-jitsu is there’s not one governing body in jiu-jitsu,” Ryan explained. “You or I could start a jiu-jitsu tournament tomorrow and one of us can have PEDs legal, and one of us could have PEDs illegal.
“The problem is that if one organization makes it so that PEDs are illegal, but then all of the other organizations that you’re competing at throughout the rest of the year say they’re legal, now I have to be clean throughout the year to compete [for] your one organization. But the rest of the guys who aren’t competing in your organization can do steroids the full-year round. So then I’m competing against those guys natural, and in the other organizations, those are the guys who are using PEDs.”
Ryan hopes things in the jiu-jitsu world can get to a more consistent place as the sport continues to rise in popularity.
Whether him and Musumeci will ever get on the same page again is one thing, but both will likely get there if the community can get there.
“It needs to be one thing across the board,” Ryan said. “They either need to be legal across the board for all of the big tournaments, or they need to be illegal because then if they’re illegal for one but they’re legal for the other, you’re just going to have athletes that won’t compete in those events. …
“If you fix that and everyone agrees PEDs are legal or PEDs are illegal, then you can kind of make some progress. But right now, if only one, or two organizations do it, it’s not really going to work.”
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