Daniel Cormier vs. Brock Lesnar fight won’t happen until at least January

Shortly after his history-making defeat of Stipe Miocic, UFC heavyweight and light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier called out Brock Lesnar. Lesnar then lumbered into the cage for a heated encounter with Cormier, complete with bravado, profanity, shoving — all the ingredients for an awesome promo.

Daniel Cormier vs. Brock Lesnar?! 😳 pic.twitter.com/VeLpWKKdzU

— UFC Europe (@UFCEurope) July 8, 2018

Shortly thereafter, it was confirmed that Cormier will indeed fight Lesnar in the future. Unfortunately, it sounds like we will have to wait a little while before these two giants of the combat sports world step into the Octagon together.

To remind, Brock Lesnar was handed a year-long suspension after he failed a drug test in the fallout of his UFC 200 defeat of Mark Hunt. As a result, Lesnar’s win was ruled a no contest, and he was handed a year-long suspension by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Shortly thereafter Lesnar “retired” from MMA, leaving his USADA suspension half-completed. In order to fight again, he’ll have to re-enter the USADA testing pool, and serve the final six-ish months of his suspension.

By the time all of this has run it’s course, it will be at least January. Dana White confirmed this reality post-fight, per Marc Raimondi of MMA Fighting.

As Dana White confirmed just now, Brock Lesnar could not fight in the UFC until around January due to his USADA suspension. #UFC226

— Marc Raimondi (@marcraimondi) July 8, 2018

Of course, Lesnar will also have to pass a battery of new drug tests before he can actually fight Cormier. In fact, Cormier implied post-fight that he won’t fight Lesnar unless the hulking pro wrestler passes tests administed by USADA, and perhaps even a second agency as well.

“Brock’s gotta be clean,” Cormier said at the UFC 226 post-fight press conference (via MMAJunkie). “I’m not going to fight him if he’s not clean. We’ll do USADA testing, and we’ll do other testing.”