Gordon Ryan shared his perspective on performance enhancers and testing protocols in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu during a recent podcast appearance.
His views challenge conventional wisdom about testing in combat sports. He believes the current approach to testing creates an uneven playing field rather than leveling it.
He explained that BJJ lacks a single governing body which makes comprehensive testing impossible to implement effectively across all organizations.
“If you start testing in one organization but you don’t test across all the organizations, all that’s going to do is make more mismatches,”
“But if you’re gonna have exclusivity, then you need to start paying the athletes, because if they’re going to be exclusive and miss out on all the other opportunities to compete in these other events, you’ve got to pay them three, four, five times as much in order to get them exclusive—and these companies don’t want to do that.”
He also highlighted an economic imbalance.
“There is far more money in beating the tests than they put into actually testing people.”
“If you have a () who’s making $10,000 and $10,000 (to win) and he trains out of a random gym in Kentucky somewhere, that guy can’t afford to have a doctor to beat the tests,”
“But if you have a champion or a guy who’s making money, that guy can afford to hire a doctor to help him beat the tests.”
This disparity means current testing policies favor elite athletes while handicapping those without comparable resources.
Gordon Ryan argued that allowing all competitors to use performance enhancers would create more equality by shifting the decision to personal choice rather than financial capability.
“Like, our bodies aren’t going to live forever, but our legacy is. And so I think that we, collectively as serious athletes, understand that. And, uh, you know, I personally think there is a flip side of the argument where it’s like, obviously, the punches are way harder, and you can do more damage and this and that. Um, but you can also recover faster, you know, you can use peptides, and you can use HGH or IGF, and you can use testosterone.”
Gordon Ryan also addressed the entertainment factor. He suggested that audiences are drawn to spectacular action and that higher athletic output can influence viewership and pay.
“The more knockouts we have, the more submissions there are, the harder hits there are in football, the faster the guys run, the more people are going to watch and the higher the athletes are going to get paid,”
For older athletes competing against younger opponents he argued that enhancement can reduce age-related disadvantages. Gordon Ryan cited Randy Couture competing into his upper forties as an example of how supplementation can extend careers. While acknowledging arguments on both sides he concluded that testing introduces complications that may outweigh its intended benefits.
“I think that we should probably just allow people to use theirs,”
