Former fighter Tony Bellew is now a prominent pundit who never holds back on his views about the sport.
This week he has been talking about the case of Ryan Garcia, who has been handed a one-year ban by the New York State Athletic Commission following his testing positive for banned substance Ostarine both before and after his fight with Devin Haney on 20 April.
Speaking to The Stomping Ground, Bellew was asked for his thoughts on Garcia and the ban.
“Sad. Very sad. You’ve got banned performance-enhancing drugs in your system. It’s steroids. Everyone knows if you’ve got steroids in your system you should be banned for life. This isn’t some kind of substance where you’ve smoked some weed, this is a banned steroid. I can’t see anything but a ban.”
Bellew has previously come under fire for not calling for the same judgement in Conor Benn’s case, but said that from what he knows the drug in question couldn’t have affected the Brit’s performance.
He then cited the case of American heavyweight, Jarrell Miller, who was found to have taken a wide range of PEDs not once but twice.
“We shouldn’t even be having these conversations any more. The perfect example is Jarrell Miller who was one molecule away from becoming The Hulk. All we had to do was ban him for life and we wouldn’t be having these conversations but they didn’t ban him which is why it continues in the sport.”
He had one sober final thought.
“The longer this continues to worse it’s going to get. Someone is going to die soon at the hands of a drugs cheat.”
Garcia’s opponent Haney has stated he might take a year out of the sport to wait for a rematch.
