UFC BJJ Booked a Man Serving a 3-Year USADA Ban as Their June Title Contender

Roosevelt De Sousa had a December to remember.

On December 13, 2025, he won the IBJJF gi world title in the ultra-heavyweight division. Then the no-gi. Back-to-back world championships at the highest level of competition. Then USADA announced he'd tested positive for meldonium at those same championships.

He accepted a three-year ban. All results stripped. Both titles gone. The clock runs to January 12, 2029.

Then UFC BJJ booked him for their June 4 event.

For those keeping score: De Sousa is currently five months into a thirty-six month USADA suspension. He won't be eligible to compete at IBJJF events again until 2029. And UFC BJJ 9 slotted him into the marquee matchup against CJI champion Nick Rodriguez.

The announcement didn't mention the ban.

What meldonium is, and why the timeline matters

Meldonium has a resume. WADA added it to the prohibited list on January 1, 2016, after it turned up in thousands of athlete samples — including Maria Sharapova's at that year's Australian Open. It's a Latvian-developed cardiac drug prescribed for ischemia and heart failure. Athletes found it also improved endurance, enhanced oxygen delivery, and accelerated recovery.

De Sousa tested positive for it in December 2025. Nearly a decade after the ban.

For context, Islam Makhachev received a shorter suspension for the same substance in 2016 — but his case had a very specific set of mitigating circumstances: he'd taken it before the ban took effect, he had documented medical use for heart surgery, he'd already stopped taking it, and only trace amounts were detected right at the cutoff. That's the most favorable version of this story.

De Sousa's version doesn't include any of those factors. He tested positive for a substance that has been on the prohibited list for nine years. Under WADA Code Article 10.8.1, he qualified for a one-year sanction reduction by accepting the violation within 20 days of notification — which brought his penalty from four years to three. He is 33 years old. He will not be eligible to compete at IBJJF events until January 2029.

The loophole that isn't quite a loophole

Here is the defense UFC BJJ would make, and it is technically correct: USADA's ban on De Sousa applies specifically to IBJJF-affiliated events. UFC BJJ is a separate organization. They have their own policies. Legally, they can book him.

This is true in roughly the same way it's true that you technically didn't break curfew if you were in a different city.

What makes this harder to brush off is that UFC BJJ's own leadership went on record about drug testing. In a November 2025 podcast appearance, UFC BJJ executive Andrew Tackett said the organization would start testing in 2026 — that "they want to do testing for everything" on shows next year. The stated goal: keeping everyone honest. Making it a real professional league.

Then the same organization booked a man who is actively serving an anti-doping ban from USADA — the exact agency the IBJJF contracted to run its testing — as their June title contender.

Predictably, no one at UFC BJJ has explained how that squares.

What the booking actually says

Nobody at UFC BJJ is claiming they support doping. That's not the issue. The issue is what their booking decisions communicate to the rest of the field.

Grappling has an anti-doping credibility problem it's been trying to solve for years. The IBJJF-USADA partnership was supposed to signal the sport was getting serious. When the sport's most prominent new promotion then books a freshly suspended USADA athlete — not by accident, but because they have no reciprocity agreement with the IBJJF — the entire framework starts to look like it protects the IBJJF's competitive calendar and nothing more.

Here's the structural problem: grapplers who get banned from IBJJF can compete everywhere else while the ban runs. UFC BJJ, rather than treating an active USADA doping ban as meaningful information about an athlete's competitive record, treated it as an administrative footnote from a different organization.

Professional leagues — actual ones — have reciprocity. An NBA player under suspension doesn't suit up for an overseas team during the ban, because the point of the suspension is competitive integrity, not compliance with a specific league's paperwork. The ban travels with the athlete. That's what makes it mean something.

UFC BJJ's version is: the ban stays at the IBJJF gate.

Clean athletes, meet your bracket

There are grapplers on UFC BJJ 9 who passed their IBJJF drug tests. Who competed clean. Who now share a card with someone who didn't — someone whose positive test, for the record, would have contributed to the performances that earned him the world titles now stripped from his record.

UFC BJJ's response to those athletes: we're working on testing, check back with us.

Nick Rodriguez didn't do anything wrong here. He competed, earned the booking, and whatever happens on June 4 has nothing to do with choices his opponent made in December. But the question UFC BJJ isn't answering is what message gets sent to every other clean athlete on that card by booking around an active ban.

Some things don't require a press conference to communicate.

What happens next

UFC BJJ 9 is June 4. Roosevelt De Sousa's ban runs to January 12, 2029. Both of these are simultaneously true.

If UFC BJJ actually starts testing — publishes the protocols, announces results, shows the receipts — there's a version of this that becomes less damaging. If De Sousa competes and passes their tests in June, that tells you something. But that version requires documented transparency, not a podcast quote about intentions from the previous November.

Until then: a man actively serving a three-year doping ban is competing as a title contender on the biggest grappling promotion in North America, and the best available defense is that the ban doesn't count in this particular parking lot.

The grappling boom promised a cleaner sport. Turns out 'cleaner' was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Roosevelt De Sousa Accepts Doping Sanction — USADA Official Announcement
• BJJ World Champion Roosevelt De Sousa Banned for Meldonium — BJJ Eastern Europe
• CJI Champ Nick Rodriguez, Ffion Davies Added to UFC BJJ 9 — Yahoo Sports / MMA Mania
• Roosevelt De Sousa Accepts 3-Year Suspension: Same Substance as Makhachev — BJJ Doc
• Andrew Tackett Confirms UFC BJJ Will Begin Drug Testing in 2026 — BJJ Eastern Europe