Silva, Diaz & Lombard Temporarily Suspended; Evans-Smith Out For 9 Months

As expected, at a Nevada State Athletic Commission hearing yesterday Anderson Silva, Nick Diaz and Hector Lombard were all handed temporary suspensions prior to an official hearing to deal with their individual cases at a later date.

Silva was suspended after testing positive for several banned substances in both an out-of-competition drugs test several weeks prior to UFC 183, and a post-fight one too. Between them he tested positive for drostanalone and androstane along with anxiety and insomnia medications Oxazepam and Temazepam, respectively.

Diaz, His opponent on January 31st, also failed his post-fight drug test, flagging postitive for marijuana metabolites for the third time in his career.

Finally, Lombard tested positive for desoxymethyltestosterone following his victory over Josh Burkman at UFC 182 at the start of January.

While these three fighters suspensions are only temporary for now, the commission did hand another fighter, Ashlee Evans-Smith an official sentence after she tested positive for a banned diuretic following her loss to Raquel Pennington at UFC 181 on December 6th.

Evans-Smith was given a nine month suspension and fined 30% of her $8,000 fight purse.

In one final piece of MMA related business NSAC opted to deny an appeal from Francisco Rivera to overturn his defeat against Urijah Faber at UFC 181 after being the victim of an illegal eye-poke which changed the course of the fight and resulted in him being submitted shortly thereafter.

NSAC ruled that since referee Mario Yamasaki did not see the eye-poke then they had no option but to uphold the original result of the fight.

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