In Belfort vs. Henderson trilogy, a snapshot of MMA's past and future with PEDs

Vitor Belfort and Dan Henderson

If all goes well at UFC Fight Night 77 on Saturday night in Sao Paulo, Vitor Belfort and Dan Henderson will fight for the third time in nine years – and maybe, if we’re lucky, this time neither of them will be on performance-enhancing drugs.

That’s a weird thing to hope for, I realize, but then, this is a weird trilogy. The precise nature of its weirdness makes it a sort of snapshot of MMA through the years. That also makes it worth paying attention to, though I’ll admit I’m not sure yet exactly what we should hope to see here.

Consider how this series started. Back in 2006, when PRIDE brought its act to Las Vegas in the waning hours of its dynasty, Belfort (24-11 MMA, 13-7 UFC) dropped a unanimous decision victory to Henderson (31-13 MMA, 8-7 UFC) and then proceeded to test positive for steroids.

In fairness to Belfort, he wasn’t alone. In fact, he was one of three fighters from that event to run afoul of the drug tests (there were only 16 fighters on the entire card), suggesting that maybe this was a predictable consequence of throwing PRIDE fighters from that era into a situation in which they were suddenly subject to the sort of regulations they’d gotten used to gleefully ignoring.

Belfort denied knowingly ingesting steroids, of course. When he went before the Nevada State Athletic Commission, he put the blame on a doctor who’d been giving him injections to aid his rehab from a knee injury. It was either those injections, Belfort said, or possibly a supplement he was taking. In this fashion, “The Phenom” managed to incorporate two of the most popular failed drug test excuses in one single defense. If only he’d had the presence of mind to blame an off-brand “marital aid,” he might have nabbed the hat trick.

Dan Henderson

But just to further muddy the issue, the following year Henderson got on testosterone-replacement therapy. He did it quietly, years before most of us even knew what it was. We didn’t even know enough to be against it yet.

Henderson went years like that, flying mostly under the radar, at least until TRT became the hot new trend in MMA. Even Belfort got in on it. In fact, he may have been a little too enthusiastic about it.

But in November 2013, a few months before TRT would be effectively banned from MMA, Belfort and Henderson met again. This was the year Belfort fought only in Brazil, which seemed more than a little suspicious. But hey, at least it was one TRT patient against another. And as he had done to the two previous opponents he faced – also in Brazil, during those TRT glory days – Belfort knocked Henderson out with a dazzling display of violence.

Maybe it’s only fitting, considering their history together, that TRT still looms over this rubber match between Belfort and Henderson.

The fight comes just a little over a month after a report by Deadspin revealed that Belfort was walking around with elevated testosterone levels just weeks before his UFC light heavyweight title bout against Jon Jones. His attempts to explain away the situation on “Inside MMA” raised as many questions as answers, especially when Belfort claimed that he “never hide(s) anything from anybody … in the media.”

Belfort has been a lot of things over the course of his nearly 20-year MMA career, but transparent isn’t one of them. He wouldn’t even admit, when asked directly, that he was on testosterone back in 2013. It wasn’t until the UFC revealed the truth shortly thereafter that we found out what might really be fueling Belfort’s late revival. Even then, as Deadspin later pointed out, we weren’t getting the full story.

Now Belfort and Henderson meet back in Brazil, but in the post-TRT world. They’ve each had their struggles since their medicine of choice was banned in 2014. Belfort ended up sitting out that entire year, then returning in a title fight against UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman, who steamrolled a visibly deflated Belfort in May. Henderson lost two in a row, then bounced back with quick knockout of Tim Boetsch in June.

Vitor Belfort

Age alone would be enough to justify a decline from either of these guys now. So would the mileage they’ve put on their bodies over the years. Add to that the loss of a powerful synthetic hormone that their respective endocrine systems had no doubt become accustomed to, and it’s a wonder they can still get up and go to the gym every day.

If you want one pairing in MMA to tell you where we’ve been, where we’re going, and the wreckage we’ve left behind in changing our minds along the way, Belfort vs. Henderson is probably as good as it gets.

They’re two guys who got one message about PEDs in PRIDE, another in the UFC’s TRT era, then a third in the USADA age. They made their own decisions and have to accept responsibility for them, but they also lived through some of the sport’s more bizarre growing pains.

And now here they are, aging rapidly together in Brazil, ready to fight one more time for stakes that couldn’t be less clear. At least there’s a paycheck in it for them. At least this time, maybe, we’ll get to see what they can do without all the other stuff in the way.

For more on UFC Fight Night 77, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.