Ketlen Vieira has been suspended for six months after testing positive for a banned steroidal substance following her title fight with Cris Cyborg at PFL Tampa in August. Mike Mazzulli, director of the Mohegan Tribe Department of Athletic Regulation, revealed the result to Sherdog on Tuesday, and Bloody Elbow reported that both Vieira’s A and B samples came back positive. The specific substance has not been publicly named.
Vieira has since released a statement, according to MMA Fighting. Per Bloody Elbow, she attributed the positive result to treatment she received for a knee injury. The commission has not publicly addressed that explanation beyond the suspension itself.
The test comes from a night that had already gone sideways for the Brazilian. Vieira weighed in at 152.2 pounds for the PFL featherweight title bout, 7.2 pounds over the 145-pound limit, which made her ineligible to win the belt before a punch was thrown. Cyborg went five rounds with her anyway and won, closing out her PFL contract with a title defense.
Cyborg’s response landed somewhere unexpected. Instead of piling on, she thanked Mazzulli and the commission on X and then brought up her own history. “In 2011, I had a positive test for a banned substance, served my suspension, accepted responsibility for what was in my body, and made major changes to the way I managed my team and supplements,” she wrote. That 2011 positive was for stanozolol after her 16-second knockout of Hiroko Yamanaka at Strikeforce, a result later overturned to a No Contest, and it cost her a year. She called the 7.2-pound miss “an extremely unusual situation” and added, “I have no interest in attacking her personally.” She signed off directly: “Ketlen, I respect you.”
Vieira’s career had real weight to it before this. She’s a former UFC title challenger, and her UFC run included a unanimous decision win over Jacqueline Cavalcanti that, as Heavy noted, stalled Cavalcanti’s climb up the bantamweight ladder. She also shared the cage with Kayla Harrison, who beat her early in Harrison’s UFC run and later told Ariel Helwani that making weight for that fight was “torture.” The two women at the top of this story, Harrison and Cyborg, both went through Vieira, and both have spoken about her with something closer to respect than dismissal.
The division she left keeps moving without her. Cavalcanti, the woman Vieira outpointed, faces Michelle Montague at UFC Qatar on November 21, and Harrison defends the UFC bantamweight title against a returning Amanda Nunes at UFC 334 at Madison Square Garden on November 14. No date or promotion has been announced for Vieira’s next fight.
My take: the knee-treatment explanation deserves a fair hearing, and fighters do end up in rough corners during camp, but a seven-pound miss and a positive steroid test from the same fight night is a hard combination to talk your way out of. Six months is a short sentence. Getting a promoter to trust her on the scale again will take longer, and Cyborg, of all people, showed her the only way back, which is owning it in public and then passing every test that follows.
