Nick Diaz fully intends to appeal against his five year suspension from MMA handed down by the Nevada State Athletic Commission earlier this month after a positive marijuana test and it seems that the UFC are going to be backing him up.
“@ufc put me in touch with their lawyers at Campbell & Williams and they will also be helping me with the NSAC,” Diaz wrote on his Twitter account earlier today.
@ufc put me in touch with their lawyers at Campbell & Williams and they will also be helping me with the NSAC
— nick diaz (@nickdiaz209) September 30, 2015
UFC president Dana White, who was in Australia with Ronda Rousey promoting UFC 193 when NSAC delivered the excessively harsh punishment, stated at the time that he’d have to wait until he knew all the facts before he commented, though he did admit that the ruling had been “jarring”.
From the looks of things he’s now had a chance to review the situation and has come to pretty much the same conclusion as everybody else outside of NSAC HQ, which is that the punishment far exceeds the crime in this instance.
White will no doubt have consulted with the UFC’s new Vice President of Athlete Health and Performance Jeff Novitzky, a world-renowned figure in the anti-doping field, and earlier this week he made it clear where he stands on the NSAC ruling.
“I’ve been immersed in anti-doping for 13 years, and I’m still constantly learning and struggling to keep up with the intricacies of it,” Novitzky told bloodyelbow.com. “It’s a difficult topic and area, but it’s one you have to get perfect, and all that being said, they didn’t get this one perfect. They got this one wrong, in my opinion.”
