Advertisement

UFC women's featherweight champ refuses to fight Cris 'Cyborg' Justino

UFC women's featherweight champ refuses to fight Cris 'Cyborg' Justino

The level of fear fighters have of Cris 'Cyborg' Justino is flat-out palpable.

And make no mistake, all of the shots fighters take at the UFC women's featherweight contender are not shots taken to inform people of Justino's drug-related past, they are shots taken out of fear.

The most recent fighter to take a shot at the former Invicta FC Champion is current UFC featherweight champion Germaine de Randamie, who took the title from Holly Hom at UFC 208.

“Germaine and her team have talked, and the position is that she will not fight Cyborg because Cyborg is a known and proven cheater,” de Randamie's manager Brian Butler said in the statement provided to Fox Sports. “Even after so much scrutiny has been put on Cyborg, she still managed to pop for something and will always be a person of suspicion who is trying to beat the system rather than just conforming to the rules."

Ronda Rousey brought up the same issues when rumors were swirling about the former UFC champ's potential matchup with Cyborg. Now de Randamie is saying the same thing. However, it is a bit ironic that de Randamie is calling Justino a cheater when she allegedly won the featherweight belt with a punch after the bell on Holm.

It's pretty simple, as true as it may be that Justino did test positive for an anabolic steroid in recent years, she has also been cleared multiple times to fight, and has also been given a waiver to use some of the drugs in question.

The situation is really this simple: Rousey didn't want to fight Cyborg because she massively outweighed her and it understandably would have been a mismatch. De Germaine doesn't want to fight her because she knows Cyborg flat-out hurts people in the cage.

This isn't about drugs, it's about fear. Plain and simple.