Despite the Ronda Rousey chapter apparently being closed shut, the WMMA pioneer has yet to retire.
Aside from a few horrifically cringey media appearances, Ronda Rousey hasn’t been seen since suffering that brutal knockout loss to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207.
In her recent appearances on talk shows, she has avoided all discussion about her fighting career, which likely ended with a pair of consecutive devastating knockout losses to Holly Holm and Nunes respectively. Even in the build-up to the Nunes fight, she refused to do any media.
During his media scrum on Tuesday, UFC president Dana White confirmed that Rousey had yet to retire, but he doesn’t expect her to ever set foot inside the Octagon again. There was one line he dropped about USADA, the official anti-doping partner of the UFC, that raised a few eyebrows.
“She’s not, she has not retired. USADA’s still popping up at her house testing her. She refuses to retire.”
It doesn't quite work like that https://t.co/zFnxOWlHP5
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) November 22, 2017
When fighters retire, they inform USADA who then remove them from the testing pool. However, there have been zero reports that Rousey has made a formal announcement she has retired from MMA.
The beauty of USADA is you can actually search every athlete in the pool on their official website and see how often they’ve been tested each year.
According to the site, at the time of writing, Conor McGregor had been tested six times in 2017 as a mixed martial artist and 11 times for professional boxing.
Rousey, on the other hand, hasn’t been tested at all in 2017.
