Kamaru Usman is once again in the news as the date approaches for him to face UK challenger Leon Edwards. Usman has been at the top of the welterweight division for quite a while defending his title a number of times against Covington, Masvidal and Gilbert Burns.
But with each octagon showing the number of fans question if there’s a secret to Usman’s success. Considering the recent gaffe his manager made, we’ve decided to look over some of the more compelling evidence suggesting there might be PED aiding Usman in his quest to remain the pound for pound champion of the UFC.
Kamaru Usman is 35 but he’s been plagued by injuries for almost a decade. Prior to transitioning to martial arts, Usman was a freestyle wrestling Olympic hopeful but he failed to make the 2012 US Olympic team trials and instead turned his attention to MMA.
Among the evidence that makes Usman suspect are his acne, especially the back acne and stomach bumps.
P2P Champion Kamaru Usman was also frequently spotted with plenty of bumps on his stomach.
Former adversary Colby Covington said these marks are an indicator of PED abuse and nicknamed Usman ‘Marty Juiceman’ along with ‘CEO of EPO’.
But the bumps aren’t exactly consistent. Varying in size and shape.
So are all these injection spots to facilitate PED use? Not so fast, one doping expert claims. Derek of the infamous More Plates More Dates channel recently shared his opinion on what these bumps are saying:
“This is a fatty deposit, that’s a very slow growing, it’s essentially a benign tumor. This is something that is non carcinogenic, or at least you’d hope. So, as far as I know, the majority of them, if not all of them are essentially benign. And they are just slow growing like fat deposits in the subcutaneous layer. So this is something that is genetic, to some extent as well. I don’t know if it’s diet related, if it’s any, like a lot of it is genetic predisposition at the end of the day. And the reason you can see it in these guys mainly is because they’re so lean. So when you have this mark up here, this mark up here, these bumps all over the f–ing place, it’s a result of your lack of body fat and lack of subcutaneous water to for a lot of these guys doing heavy weight cuts, and you see any sort of abnormalities appear on the surface of the skin or otherwise they would have been shrouded in fat and water. ”
He later continued: “How do you know it’s not HGH and insulin? Reason being is you would never inject your HGH and insulin up here at the top of your stomach – down here is where you would inject the intramuscular is in general, where you would pin oil based compounds…”
“So hypothetically, if you’re trying to avoid doping, you know, you might intramuscular chute your insulin or your HGH or your whatever, depending on the circumstance, sometimes the pharmacokinetic profile will not make it actually clear faster, if you do it intramuscular. Tt kind of depends on the situation. But anyways, like in general, if you pin something intramuscular fat is going to take longer to absorb something. So it’s why you can altered the kind of like half life of a testosterone, for example, if you pinned it into your subcutaneous fat layer, because this is an oil based compound that takes a long time to otherwise, you know, cleave the ester and get fully absorbed into the serum. And when you’re introducing into fat tissue, you’re just making it more difficult for your body to break it down essentially, whereas for you know, water based compounds.”
But Usman also has a bad acne problem – and a problem that’s relatively new.
Meanwhile back in 2017, Usman’s back was devoid of bacne.
But Usman also has prominent traps – which has long been another marker of PED use.
Male deltoids and trapezoids have a higher number of androgen receptors than other muscles. Hence they experience the most growth when using PEDs.
But while it’s fun to speculate it’s much more interesting what something like EPO would do to an athletes body. For one EPO is much harder to detect and is usually detected by an athletes’ entire history of tests versus a single one. TJ Dillashaw is a noted example of this. Dillashaw admitted to using EPO after USADA findings – and USADA then went back and checked his previous biomarkers dating back several years to pin point the period of use.
So while there are some eye brow raising factors in Usman’s appearance it’s far more interesting if he’s actually the CEO of EPO considering EPO is one of those things that undoubtedly impacts an athlete’s performance pretty drastically unlike most other things which are definitely enhancers but perhaps wouldn’t produce statistical differences on every and each octagon outing.