Chris Weidman, Jorge Masvidal, and Dustin Poirier turned a routine GOAT debate into a group therapy session about the old UFC drug-testing grind. During a new Deep Waters discussion, the three former UFC stars started swapping USADA stories, and suddenly the talk had less to do with legacy lists and more to do with agents showing up at the worst possible time.
It was the kind of conversation that hits differently after years of fighters dealing with random visits, whereabouts apps, and bathroom logistics that apparently could ruin a perfectly good day. Long before this trio started laughing about it, Paige VanZant had her own absurd USADA bathroom story, and the same era produced plenty of testing-room weirdness around the sport’s biggest names.
Watch the Deep Waters segment below:
USADA Stories Got Weird Fast
Weidman said one visit followed him onto a golf course, which sounds funny until you remember fighters under that system could not just wave testers away and finish the back nine.
“I was golfing one time and so they had to come to the golf course and they waited for me at the turn,” Weidman said. “I had to go take pee and blood, and my boys had to wait for me to do it, because once they see you, you can’t leave their eyesight.
“They have to see you within an hour of calling you. Once they get in contact with you, you have like an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”
The former middleweight champion also said he once got a warning after leaving for a mountain house and failing to update his location in the app. He tried to race back when testers arrived at his home, but traffic beat him like a bad scorecard.
“I failed a drug test once—I didn’t fail it, but I got a warning because I went to my mountain house, which is two hours away, and I didn’t put it on my USADA app that I was there, and I got a call that they were at my house,” Weidman said. “So now I had to fly home. I’m flying there, but I hit some traffic. The guy left and that was a warning because I didn’t get tested within the two-hour frame. I’m like, ‘Bro.’”
That same stress followed Weidman into the build toward UFC 205, when he said a knee injury and a hospital visit left him worried about how another visit might look.
“Another good one is when I was fighting Yoel Romero, they tested me a million times because everyone was worried about Yoel being on stuff, so I’m getting tested,” Weidman said. “Three and a half weeks before the fight, I ended up injuring my knee, I had to get surgery. So I get a surgery, but I don’t tell the UFC, because if the UFC finds out I have that—And this is the first event ever in New York, I’m like, I’m fighting, I don’t give a shit.
“So I do the IV, I come back from the hospital, I’m on the painkillers and everything, and I have the band on my arm from the IV and you’re not allowed to get IVs, so all of a sudden doors are getting knocked on, ringing the doorbell. USADA. So I’m pretending like I just didn’t have a surgery. I had to undo all the shit on my leg. It was a f*cking nightmare and I was so paranoid that I was going to get in trouble, but it ended up being good.”
Masvidal’s story may have been the most cartoonishly annoying. He said testers arrived after he had already trained hard, hit the sauna, and lost a chunk of weight, then followed him from American Top Team to Miami while he waited for nature to stop stalling.
“They had me after training one time, and I had done the whole training session,” Masvidal said. “I went in the sauna and everything, like, 15-20 minutes after I’m done they show up and I’m like, ‘You guys are going to be with me all day, because I’ll tell you right now, I lost eight or nine pounds in this training session, I’m not pissing for a while, so you guys are going to have to chill with me.’
“I’m at Top Team, they followed me all the way to Miami. Take them everywhere with me, eating, drinking. They’re like, ‘You still don’t got to go to the bathroom?’ ‘You can’t rush this, brother. Just when it happens. You’ve got to get me before practice, don’t ever come after practice.’”
Poirier had his own dealership special, with a planned home visit turning into something much less private.
“One time USADA called me when I was buying a truck,” Poirier said. “I was at the dealership sitting down signing papers. They call me, like, no way I can get to my house in an hour right now, so they met me at the dealership. Urine and blood, at the dealership.”
The UFC worked with USADA from 2015 through 2023, a period that changed the sport’s drug-testing culture and gave fighters plenty of horror stories along the way. The agency’s exit did not erase the memories. If anything, clips like this show how much weird daily friction came with a program that was built to be unpredictable by design, not unlike the old Nate Diaz USADA waiting game that became part of MMA folklore.
“Another time they came, they knocked on my door, it was, like, 6 a.m. on Super Bowl Sunday,” Poirier said. “I was mad.”
“6 a.m. on a Sunday, they’ve done that to me, like, twice,” Masvidal said. “I wanted to kill them.”
That was not a technical anti-doping debate. That was three veterans laughing through the kind of inconvenience that only sounds funny after the career mileage has already been paid. With old USADA tales joining everything from VanZant’s bathroom nightmare to Jon Jones’ drug-test visit case, the UFC’s testing era is still producing stories long after the partnership ended.
