The Wake of Cyborg & The Burning Wreckage of Woman's MMA

Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos (10-1, 1 NC) is arguably the most dominant fighter in combat sports. Male or female. Blessed with amazing power and strength, Cyborg blasted her opponents with the type of savage Muay Thai you'd expect from the most lethal Chute Box fighters, such as Wanderlei, Shogun, and Anderson. A fighter with her abilities and fire should be the legitimizing force in a sport desperately needing validation and its first mega-star. Yet the greatest female combatant to ever step into an octagon has destroyed her own legacy and left the entire sport of Women's MMA in flames. It all started on August 15, 2009 ... but we'll get back to that in just a second. Part I: The Curse of Dominance First, let's look at Cris Santos. Cyborg didn't just win her matches. She destroyed the women facing her so completely that they lost the will to fight. Her dominance can only be compared to a young, angry Tyson. And she was getting better each fight. Eight of her last nine fights ended in TKO or KO. In fact, she sat on the shelf for the last year and a half while Strikeforce tried to figure out what to do with her. Rumors persisted that other fighters wanted no part of the berserker from Brazil, especially after what she did to Jan Finney. You'd shoot a horse just out of mercy if it suffered half as much as Finney did that night. Do you know how long Chris has fought in the last eighteen months? Just 16 seconds. How can she be the standard bearer for WMMA when she can barely even get into the octagon? At least Tyson had a lineup of chumps he could feast on every few months. At least he could build a highlight reel. Cyborg was sitting in limbo. The greatest female fighter ever was left to twiddle her thumbs while the rest of the sport struggled to catch up. Her supremacy worked against her in another fashion, as well. Not only were opponents scarce, but the highlight reels of her fights did not seem like sport to the viewing public. They seemed like a mugging. Dominance among male fighters is celebrated and admired, but with women it triggers a protective instinct. After all, these are our mothers, wives, and daughters getting brutalized with knees and elbows. Cyborg is so physically advantaged against other female fighters that her fights are more like domestic abuse. Your first reaction isn't to cheer, but to cringe for the poor girl on the end of those beatings. Its sexist for sure, but inevitable for such a young sport. After the matches, women with bloodied faces and eyes swollen shut standing next to this hulking figure is not the image that civilized society wants broadcast into their homes. Even if she could get opponents, there was no way she was going lead the revolution. None of this was her fault though. She was just too damned good, too early in the sport. Except for one little detail ... Part II: Proof Positive After the Yamanaka fight, Cyborg tested positive for steroids. Steroids. She offered up the same song and dance that every athlete caught with their hand in the cookie jar has done. It wasn't me, it was someone else that gave it to me and I didn't know. Oopsy. Until that test, I defended her. It was genetics. It was hard work. It was the next generation of female athletes. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt despite the obvious visual evidence. With one positive result, whatever lame excuse her camp has offered, it is now essential to cast that same suspicion not just on her last fight, but on her entire career. Here is a picture of several of the women that Cris Santos has fought throughout the years (specifically Shayna Baszler, Yoko Takahashi, Jan Finney, Erica Paes, Gina Carano, Marloes Coenen, Hiroko Yamanaka, & Vanessa Porto): They are lean and athletic, clearly in great shape and conditioning. Despite their commitment to a combat craft and intensive exercise, these bodies (and faces) look decidedly female. Characteristically female in fact. I tried to get these ladies all at their weigh-ins (where possible) so that we could see an apples to apples comparison of their weight loss and body fat. And now here's Cyborg: The difference is just amazing. Whether she's juiced her entire career or not ... whether its just this one instance of bad luck, it doesn't matter. The entire MMA community thinks she's a career abuser just based on those pictures above and that one failed test. And I have to say, I agree with them. It paints a different picture of her dominance now. She wasn't a freak athlete ahead of her time, a victim of her era. No, she was a cheater and a cheater in the worst way. She was chemically becoming a man and fighting women. Whatever fights she partook in was not Women's MMA. Far from it in fact. If I qualify for the Olympics by surgically attaching a horse body to my torso to make myself into a centaur and then I win every single track and field event ... it doesn't mean anything. Its a farce, a joke, a spectacle. That's what steroids is in female sports. Its a man-she-thing hybrid. How can you call that a woman's sport? It's a science experiment and a sideshow. Part III: The Fallen Queen The damage to the credibility and sustainability of WMMA was bad enough with Cyborg cheating and blasting overwhelmed opponents in the octagon. Perhaps the worst aspect of this whole mess though is that the sport lost an opportunity. As I said at the beginning of this piece, Cyborg's wake of destruction began on August 15, 2009. That was when she fought Gina Carano for the inaugural Strikeforce Women's Featherweight Championship. This was the heaviest weight division of women in Strikeforce and the most prestigious. Cyborg (7-1) vs. Carano (7-0). Make no mistake about it, this was not a lamb led to the slaughter. Carano could fight. She was a striker with four finishes on her young record (and a Muay Thai record of 12-1-1). And she was young, only 27 at the time of the fight. Plenty of time for a long career. Most importantly, she was a media darling. She had the charm, the looks, and the personality to match her skills. She was listed in Maxim's Hot 100 in 2009. She was ranked in #5 in Yahoo's Most Influential Women in 2008. She was a woman's woman and pushing the boundaries of a male dominated profession. Then she fought Cyborg. The fight ended in a TKO with 1 second left in the first round. Carano had her moments, but it was clear that she was physically outmatched by the more powerful Brazilian. Over two years later, she has yet to fight again. Gina gets rough treatment from MMA fans for not returning to the sport and instead making movies. I can't be so critical, particularly if you just got into a fight with a man dressed up as a woman. You'd have to question your skills with that type of hidden disadvantage, right? The question I ask is this: would Cyborg have beaten her if there was no element of steroids? Maybe yes, maybe no. No matter what the result might have been if we could be sure 100% that Cyborg never juiced, on that day back in August of 2009, WMMA took a serious blow. They lost the most marketable face in WMMA. They lost their girl next door, their rising star. Now with Cyborg facing another period of inactivity, this time a suspension rather than lack of challengers, the gulf that Cris Santos left in the sport is even more telling. Thanks to Cyborg, neither she nor Gina is there to stand in the quickly fading spotlight. The Future? Things look dire for now, but there is hope though. Maybe one day someone might come along with the charm to woo new fans and the brawn to stand up to Cyborg when she returns from her suspension. Maybe one day we'll have our first legitimate female MMA star ...