'I've taken everything' - an interview with the Bad Guy

UFC legend Chael Sonnen on doping, getting caught and gyms where top-flight fighters don't know they're being juiced

'The best way to reach me is to say your message into a sack, then roll the window down at 60 and throw it out. It will get to me', is how retired UFC prize fighter and self-styled bad guy Chael Sonnen responds to my initial request for his email address, made via X.

Feted as the sport's greatest ever trash-talker - he famously once claimed to have witnessed the feared Brazilian heavyweight Nogueira twins mistaking a bus for a horse after arriving in Las Vegas ('there was a bus that pulled up to a red light and little Nog tried to feed it a carrot, while big Nog was petting it') - Sonnen delighted during his fighting days in playing the villain to generate hype.

Today, thanks to his You're Welcome podcast and YouTube channel - both of which he uses to act as a tour guide to the ceaselessly and cartoonishly entertaining world of cage-fighting - Sonnen, who is 46, has a strong claim to being his sport's most influential voice. He's also the rarest of creatures: a former elite-level professional athlete prepared to talk about using performance enhancing drugs.

'I've taken everything on the off-chance it would work', Sonnen tells me when he eventually agrees to be interviewed. 'The only three things that work are testosterone, growth hormone and EPO. Everything else is garbage'.

A few minutes later, he will clarify: 'Performance enhancing drugs, so that you understand - I can tell by looking at you, you've never done them - but they will take you to a place that you can't get, no matter how much you lifted, or you did nutrition, or your parents had good DNA. They will take you to a whole other gear. They will take you to a place a human being can't get to'.

Sonnen, who holds a degree in the unlikely subject of sociology, is an astonishingly articulate man - he talks with the kind of speed and fluency that would have made him a brilliant evangelist, or huckster. On his podcast, to which this writer is a devotee, he rejoices in making what sounds like a straightforward proposition - namely, organising fights and getting people to watch - sound so incredibly complex you find yourself grateful he's taken the time to explain it all.

He was also an outstanding fighter, competing 49 times over the course of a 22-year professional career, which included three UFC world championship bouts. After the first - an agonising defeat in 2010 against Anderson Silva that he'd looked certain to win after holding his opponent down for four straight rounds and smashing him repeatedly very hard in the face, mainly with his elbows - he was suspended for anabolic steroid use. The California State Athletic Commission ruled he'd failed to disclose he was taking a testosterone supplement prescribed for the treatment of hypogonadism.

Sonnen explains: 'You've got to understand, I used testosterone because testosterone is king, there is no performance enhancer that God ever made that is more effective than testosterone. Testosterone was legal. Some commissions you had to have an exemption and some commissions you just had to disclose it. But I knew all of those rules and I followed them every time, including the times they popped me and said I was in violation. They were wrong. I was one hundred percent in compliance'.

He adds that at no point in his career did he ever try to hide from the authorities what he was taking. 'I had my own litmus test, which was: if I take it from a doctor, if it's allowed, then it's legal and it's okay. I'll take two. This is what I believed. I also didn't try to conceal it. I wrote down what I was taking. They would then test me and a lot of times not find it in my system'.

How to square that statement, though, with his admission in March that when he fought Jon Jones - considered by many to be the greatest mixed martial artist of all time - for the light heavyweight championship in 2013, he was doped to the gills, and that he believed his opponent was, too?

'We know our own. I could tell very easily,' Sonnen told MMA Hour podcast host Ariel Helwani. 'I had more juice than Tropicana and he pushed me around like a Mack Truck. As soon as we locked up with each other and he's pushing me backwards, before the big spinning elbow, I remember thinking "oh, I know your secret, because I got the same one"'.

Doesn't secrecy imply he knew what he was doing was against the rules?

Sonnen is adamant it doesn't. 'The commission was the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, which to this day has my file. I turned in that I was taking testosterone. Jon Jones had that same opportunity and did not turn that in. So that's the distinction I make. I don't care that he used testosterone'.

Throughout our interview, Sonnen, who is likeable and generous with his time, repeatedly makes clear he doesn't want to sound as if he is defending himself against accusations he cheated. 'I don't like any part where I'm using a defence. I've never been falsely accused. Everything they thought was in my system was, and I put it there intentionally'. Later, he adds: 'My way of breaking every rule every athletic commission ever set forth, and being the guy that goes on ESPN to talk about the other guys that break the rules, was to have no defence'.

He points out, too, how ludicrous anti-doping protocols could seem, and how easily gamed: 'The leading agency in the world is the Nevada State Athletic Commission. They approved me in less than an hour to take anabolic steroids, known as testosterone. They approved me. I can take it and my opponent can't. Very next up was Nick Diaz. They gave him a five-year ban for marijuana... which is a death sentence, for a street drug'.

Sonnen claims to be able to tell with 100 percent accuracy what performance enhancing drugs any athlete is taking merely by looking at them. 'Conor [McGregor] looks the part, he's got great DNA. He's clean. Kamaru Usman looks the part, he's got great DNA. He's clean,' he reports.

However, he says he is certain the most famous basketball player in the world is doping.

'He takes EPO. Statement. Not "I think he takes EPO"... I wouldn't know if he was anaemic or had other reasons to need a medication. I'm not trying to snitch on him. I am stating a fact: that body is not what you get from running up and down a court. You got testosterone supplements, you got growth hormone supplements and you have EPO.' For good measure, he adds two of Hollywood's most bankable action heroes are also doping, despite multiple public denials by both.

He says he knows of two gyms where high-level fighters are being doped without their knowledge by unscrupulous coaches, who are applying EPO, testosterone and human growth hormone topically, disguised in blameless-seeming creams or ointments.

'There's two gyms... I'm not going to name them, so don't even bother to ask me. This isn't kind of they're juiced up. One hundred percent of the athletes they have signed that have ever competed on TV are juiced up. One hundred percent. If you go into the gym, the girl that's working the front desk is juiced up. A 40 year-old mother of two is juiced up. You go "what is going on here?"

'You're looking at everybody in that gym and associated with it. Two different gyms. Everybody except the owner... and the head coach. You look at everyone in that gym, hundreds of members, high school kids. The owner and the head coach, at both gyms [are clean]. That's an incredible coincidence. That's an incredible coincidence that one could speculate is because wherever they're putting it, in the shampoo, in the soap, in the hand sanitiser or wherever it is, they know and they don't touch it.'

Suddenly, our time is up and Sonnen has to go. After 45 minutes in his company it's clear not only is he the opposite of the bad guy he claims he is, he's also - to use the term he reserves on his podcast only for the fight game's most wildly entertaining personalities - a treat.