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MMA is one of the most interesting sports in the world. Bringing martial artists from around the world into a cage and making them fight till someone is unconscious, submits or time runs out evokes a mad excitement amongst both casual and die hard MMA fans.

Whenever you think of mixed martial arts, you think of the UFC. The ultimate fighting championship has grown to become the biggest MMA organisation in the world today. President of the UFC, Dana White, has built the organisation to what it is but it wasnt always this popular.

Back in the early 90’s the very first UFC event took place, in a very low profile manner. It was a no rules event that would act as an answer to many martial arts related questions such as can a wrestler beat a boxer and can a jui jitsu practitioner beat a pure striker. The entertainment value was there but the credibility wasnt. Alot of people labelled it human cock fighting and very few, if any, media outlets would go near it. 

The event was notable for the emergence of royce gracie, a jui jitsu practitioner who won a 16 man tournament by introducing the jui jitsu style to a number of unknowing opponents.

In the early 2000’s, after the advice of Dana White, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta took a chance on the UFC and bought it for $2 million. The fertittas were brothers who owned a number of casinos across the United States. Dana White would become the president.

The years rolled by and the UFC started to gain some popularity, the sport had become alot more cleaner and the rules had become more stricter. They began featuring soon to be household names like Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Randy Coutour and BJ Penn. Fighters that would captivate a very steadily growing audience. The UFC were still not where they need to be financially until they launched The Ultimate Fighter series. This is a reality based television show that would showcase the personalities of up and coming fighters and pit them against each other for a chance to win a six figure contract at the end. In the words of dana white “”. The first season of the show was funded by Dana and then co owners Lorenzo and Frank Fretitta. Thanks to an epic season finale fight between Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin, The show was a success and the UFC found a platform to grow and become mainstream.

Between the mid 2000’s to 2016. The UFC enjoyed huge success under the management of Dana White and the Fertitta brothers. The organisation became a credible sport and produced some of the greatest athletes in the world who would go on to become household names. Fighters like George St Pierre, Ronda Rousey, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones were showcasing their skills in the now world famous octagon and as a result they became more popular around the world. As a result of the UFC’s success, more MMA promotions started to emerge around this time. The likes of Strikeforce and WEC found a platform to showcase their MMA athletes but the UFC was ‘Ultimately’ the biggest game in town and they soon bought out their competition.

In 2016, The $2 million dollar gamble had paid off in a spectacular way. The UFC was bought for about $4 billion by a group named Endeavor. The sale is considered one of the biggest in the history of sports and stands as a landmark moment for a sport that nobody wanted any association with. 

The UFC keeps going from strength to strength. The face of the UFC, Dana White has continued to take the sport forward with deals with ESPN and Abu Dhabi, The development of a performance institute and even showing bravery in the face of the COVID pandemic by finding ways to keep the show going.

Football for years has had many water cooler moments. The type of moments that gets conversations going around the water cooler at work. A lot of this conversation would surround a decision that the referee has made or an incident that a referee acted or didn’t act upon.

The referees job on the pitch is to keep law and order on the pitch and make the final decisions On goals and fouls while maintaining the respect of the players around him. The referee is the person that takes the bulk of the blame whenever there is controversy on the pitch. The old saying “who would be a referee” rings true whenever these incidents happen. 

As the game evolved, there was always a constant and thats the abuse of referees for their decisions. 

To take the pressure off the referees and give them some much needed protection, VAR was created and introduced to top flight dutch football in 2014. After years of trials and tweaks, FIFA, the international football governing association approved its use in the 2018 world cup. Due to its introduction, the 2018 world cup was credited as the cleanest world cup since 1986 with only 4 players being sent off in the entire tournament and a total of 29 penalty kicks were awarded. The innovation of video assisted refereeing was credited for catching many fouls that a normal refereeing system would not have caught. 

The highs of the technology may have started and ended with the World Cup. After its initial success, the footballing associations of many football leagues decided to implement the system and flaws started to show. Some decisions made by VAR were still very suspect and some decisions were clearly wrong. The system clearly does its job very well against factual decisions like offsides but fails with subjective decisions like penalties and other fouls around thepitch that require a player to be disciplined. The fans suffer a little too as there is an unknown waiting period and stoppage in a game when a decision is being checked. Although there has been an improvement with the latter issue, there is a growing belief that VAR is adding to controversial moments on a football pitch rather than decreasing them.

At the end of the day, the video assisted referee is a referee with the ability to view replays of incidents. It’s a system that is still very prone to human error. The system brings some much needed accuracy to the decision making but there’s an argument to be made that nothing has really changed as far as referee related controversies on the pitch because unlike the goal line technology, the decisions are still man made. 

The term doping is used in sports and athletics to describe the act of taking an illegal substance in order to gain an unfair advantage in a competitive environment.

Doping has been a part of professional sport for over 100 years. Athletes in the early 1900’s were using alcohol. The frst case came in the 1902 olympics when a distance runner used alcohol to stimulate himself and finish the race. That was one of tje first known cases but its likely that doping of this kind was done even earlier. Since there were no penalties for doping during this time, athletes admitted to it freely. Once the benefits were realised by more athletes, a wave of new drugs entered competitive sport.

Throughout the decades we have seen the introduction of Amphetamines, Testosterone replacement, Steroids and EPO. Sporting environments became ravaged with PEDs. It became well known in sporting circles that alot of the top athletes were doing something to improve their strength, speed, stamina or endurance. The pressure to test athletes became too strong and sporting federations acted.

In the late 90’s, The World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) was established. They began a campaign to rid sports of all doping. They have implemented a number of National Anti-Doping associations world wide. Since its inception, these doping associations have made tremendous progress. Alot of famous athletes have been caught and punished as a result of WADA’s work. 

Athletes that have been caught include, Former Pro Cyclist, Lance Armstrong, Athletics competitor Tyson Gay, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco and Alex Rodrigues from Major League Baseball  and  Former footballer, Diego Maradonna. These athletes have been used as examples of how doping can lead to severe consequences. Alot of these athletes, in the aftermath, lost most maybe years from their careers to to lengthy bans, they lost sponsorship deals with millions, they lost the respect of peers (Those that were not doping) and fans. If the punishment for being caught is so severe, why would the athletes take the risk.

Lance Armstrong has gone on record to say that if he could do it all again he would. Mark McGwire was chasing a home run record in 1998 during a time when steroid use was rife within baseball, Tyson gay was running races during the era of Usain bolt, arguably the greatest short distance runner we’ve ever seen. The argument from their point of view is that they couldn’t compete without performance enhancers. Sports in general had become saturated with PEDs, if you were not taking anything you weren’t competing for the top honours. If Lance Armstrong didn’t take human growth hormone and EPO, he may have never won the consecutive Tour de France titles that he did and given the sport of cycling the popularity that it had as its standout star. Would Baseball have been as popular as it was in the late 90s and early 2000’s without the enhanced athletes. Usain Bolt is a freak of nature, he is an 8 time olympic champion and has won several other accolades. He has been drug tested so many times that he has come out and complained about it. Those who compete with Usain may feel that to get any kind of advantage against him they have to dope. This post is not designed to praise doping or excuse the practice but it’s designed to make people think about why those who dope do it. 

The modern day athlete is a physical specimen. Human beings have evolved to be much faster and stronger than we were centuries ago. We’ve also become smarter, scientific research and discoveries have reached new heights and it continues to improve. There are those who are currently looking at ways to cheat the system without being flagged for violating the rules. As long as competition exists among humans, we will always be looking for a way to gain an advantage over our competitors, fairly or not. It’s now up to the Anti-Doping associations to catch the cheats and clean up sports around the world.

The 2 part documentary, Lance, tells the story of how Lance Armstrong rose to prominence in the cycling world and became a household name and then fell from grace after the doping controversy. Lance Armstrong got what he deserved by trying to cheat his way to the top of the sport of cycling and compromising its integrity. 

Lance Armstrong is an incredible athlete and there’s no debating that. He started competing at an early age and very quickly ascended to the top of professional cycling. That ascension however is filled with doping scandals, lies and deception. In the early 90s he realised that many of the top pro cyclists had started using a number of performance enhancing drugs to get ahead and he made a decision that would change his life forever by choosing to participate in doping. 

When Lance fought cancer and made his return to professional cycling in the mid to late 90s, a lot of people questioned if he could get back to the top of the sport. Not only did he get back to the top of the sport, he won 7 Tour de France titles in a row. An incredible feat for sure but then people started to wonder if it was possible for a man to have gone through what Lance had gone through and achieve what he went on to achieve without a helping hand.

The years would go by as the questions were asked and Lance would stand firm that he hasn’t cheated. He was so sure that he would get away with it that when former members of his team took him to court over the doping allegations in 2005, he lied under oath and it seemed at the time that he had gotten away with it.

USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) conducted a thorough investigation of Lance Armstrong between 2010 and 2013 and after years of public denial he finally admitted to doping. He delivered his admission in 2013 in an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey. A man who was once loved by millions around the world, a man who up until the final days of the USADA investigation still had droves of supporters who still believed him and believed in him was reduced to nothing but a liar and a cheat. 

In the aftermath of the admission, Lance would be banned from cycling and have his Tour de France titles stripped from him, he would lose tens of millions of dollars in sponsorship money, his biggest sponsor at the time, Nike, severed ties with him and even the charity that he started changed its name from the Lance Armstrong foundation to the Livestrong foundation and severed ties with him in a bid to maintain a positive image. 

Lance Armstrong stated that if he could do it again, he wouldn’t change a thing. A response that will surely anger those that were caught up in his many years of lies and deception. He is an example of what happens when you try and cheat your way to the top, it will eventually catch up with you and you can go from being a national hero to a national villian.

The 2 part documentary, Lance, tells the story of how Lance Armstrong rose to prominence in the cycling world and became a household name and then fell from grace after the doping controversy. It was an eye opening documentary and although this may be an unpopular opinion, I think Lance Armstrong is a hero for what he achieved and overcame in his career.

Much like a lot of other sporting greats, There was something special about lance from an early age. At the age of 15 he was competing and more than holding his own in triathlon competitions with fully grown men. From there he focused his talents on just cycling, he competed with olympians and excelled. After making so many waves and earning numerous accolades in America, He decided to conquer the world by winning the UCI world road championships in 1993. This was his biggest achievement to date but it was a precursor for what was to follow in his career. He would go on to win several national and European accolades over the next few years.

In October 1996, Lance faced his biggest and hardest battle. He was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, his doctors gave him very little of surviving but he overcame all the odds and by February 1997, he was declared cancer free. This triumph over cancer would be a catalyst for another of Armstrong’s great achievements. He started the Lance Armstrong Foundation in a bid to raise awareness for those affected by cancer. The foundation has gone on to raise half a billion dollars.

Once he was fully recovered, Armstrong went back to full time training with the goal of competing in the Tour de France race. The Tour de France is the world’s most prestigious cycling race, it’s a race where 22 teams of 9 enter and cover a distance of 3,500km over 21 days. Each day there will be a new stage to complete and The winner is the cyclist who can complete the most stages in the shortest amount of time. Between 1999 – 2005, he would go on to win the Tour de France every single year. A truly remarkable sporting comeback story.

I understand how easy it is to call Lance Armstrong a cheat for the doping controversies but you can’t discount his athleticism, his winning mentality, his battling spirit to overcome a debilitating disease like cancer and then not only comeback but winning amongst the elite. Let’s not forget the incredible work he has done for charity over the years. Lance Armstrong has inspired a lot of people in and out of cycling over the last 30 years and for that he is a hero.