Cut from the UFC before a funeral, Elias Theodorou facing new fight

UFC veteran Elias Theodorou spoke with FanSided about his departure from the UFC and how he’s refocusing his career toward medical advocacy.

On May 4, Elias Theodorou was the No. 13 ranked middleweight in the UFC riding a three-fight win streak against progressively tougher competition. That night, Theodorou dropped a disappointing and uneventful decision to Derek Brunson in the co-main event of UFC Ottawa.

A few weeks later, Theodorou found himself without a job, cut by the UFC despite an 8-3 record with the promotion, a gregarious social media presence, and natural ease in front of the camera. Theodorou received the call that he had been released by the UFC at the worst imaginable time.

“They called me literally right before I was tying my tie to go to a funeral,” Theodorou told FanSided. “It was a shock. It devastated me and devastated my girlfriend who was with me and we were just shattered.”

While the timing of his release was far less than ideal, Theodorou used it to arrive at a moment of clarity.

“It was in that moment where I really realized how lucky I am,” he remembers. “The contrast of going to a funeral of someone that was taken way too early… and just to realize in that moment that I’m so lucky because I’m healthy, my father is healthy, and just kind of putting it all in perspective.”

Theodorou’s world had crashed down around him. He’s been here before, but he recognizes that setbacks in life often represent opportunities for rapid growth. “When one door closes, another opens” is an aphorism Theodorou knows well.

In fact, Theodorou came to MMA following a very public embarrassment to his young ego. As a teenager, he gained a bit of local notoriety winning street fights. That notoriety backfired, though, when Theodorou found himself in a fight he had no business being in.

“One of them kind of went a little viral in high school, and that’s how I got my identity: getting into fights,” Theodorou explained. “And then at university, I failed in the capacity of fighting someone that I shouldn’t have, and it was all filmed. My only real loss up to that point was caught on tape, and it went viral before I even understood the concept of being viral.”

“In that moment, my identity was kind of shattered,” he said. Like any street tough, Theodorou had eventually met his match. Rather than hiding from defeat, though, he used it as motivation. On the advice of his father, Theodorou found an MMA gym, quickly fell in love with the sport and dedicated his complete effort to becoming a professional fighter.

In 2014, Theodorou won The Ultimate Fighter Nations as a representative of Canada, launching his 11-fight UFC career.

“I just showed up at the gym and just never left. And in four short years, I was able to go from never being in a martial arts gym to winning The Ultimate Fighter… In many ways, getting there was half the battle, and then being there for five years, it was was the greatest part of my life.”

Theodorou is an incredibly high-energy individual. It’s difficult to imagine him wallowing in the sadness of defeat, resting on his laurels waiting for a new opportunity to present itself. Instead, he used his renewed perspective and release from the UFC as a push forward to new things.

“I very much wanted to hit the ground running in regards to reinventing myself. Moving forward, I’m excited because I want to prove others wrong, but more importantly myself right in regards to my convictions and what I want to do next.”

Theodorou certainly isn’t closing the door on a return to the cage, but fighting is no longer his primary focus. He’s pivoting to a new opponent. Now months later, without the restrictions of USADA and the UFC over him, Theodorou has thrown himself head-first into a new fight: medical cannabis advocacy.

“I’m fighting for medical equality,” explains Theodorou. He doesn’t shy from the fact that what he’s doing is “cannabis advocacy,” but he views his fight more broadly as one for freedom — freedom to medicate as prescribed by his doctor.

Theodorou often mentions that his cannabis advocacy is being done in a “very Canadian way.” Indeed, he argues that it is his fundamental right as a Canadian citizen and athlete to be permitted to use medical cannabis as prescribed by his doctor.

In October 2018, Canada formally legalized cannabis nationwide. However, some individuals, such as athletes like Theodorou, are nonetheless prohibited from using cannabis despite receiving a physician’s prescription to do so. Theodorou argues that these restrictions are based on an antiquated and discriminatory stigma surrounding cannabis that unfairly violates certain individuals’ right to medicate.

“This is really about medical equality, in the sense that people can medicate with different types of things, and I’m not allowed to because of an outdated mindset,” he says. “Other people don’t have access in regards to cannabis. It’s first responders, union workers, and other people that work in construction.”

“I understand the aspect of, there’s a need to be safe, and there’s obviously some impairment in some capacity. But whether it’s using heavy machinery or, in my case, being able to medicate throughout fight camp, there’s kill off periods that take away aspects of impairment and competitive advantage.”

In Theodorou’s personal experience, he became frustrated knowing that cannabis would address his chronic pain, but was nonetheless prohibited from using it as prescribed by his physician.

“An athlete in the UFC can use Vicodin literally the day of the fight and there wouldn’t be an issue,” he says. “But I can’t use cannabis a week out or during fight week to help me manage my bilateral neuropathic pain… It flares uncontrollably, sometimes during the weight cut because of the damage I put on my body, day in and day out, and also leading up to the fight.”

Ultimately, Theodorou is pushing back against arbitrary restrictions in favor of cannabis being treated just like any other medication. Instead, even though cannabis is legal in Canada both recreationally and medicinally, Theodorou was forced to try other prescription drugs to manage his chronic pain before his doctor could prescribe cannabis.

“I had to exhaust all first-line medicine, like your opioids, your pain killers, your antidepressants… I have to basically exhaust all other options leading up to it.”

“It got to the point that my doctor is like, ‘I gotta look this up, because we don’t prescribe this anymore. This hasn’t been prescribed since the 90s.’ For instance, the antidepressants. They literally numb you. So you don’t have pain, but they’re giving you an antidepressant. I’m not depressed in any way, shape or form.”

“That’s not what you do in medicine,” he continues. “You don’t say, okay, we know what works. We know what really works for you, but let’s try everything under the sun.”

Theodorou says that his absurd experience with “backwards medicine,” as he calls it, is a result of the stigma surrounding cannabis. It’s a stigma that doesn’t apply to traditional prescription drugs, like opioids, that may be significantly more dangerous than cannabis.

“The mere aspect of it becoming legal now has chopped off a lot of this stigma,” he says. “If you look back to the history of why cannabis is illegal in the first place, it’s racism, it’s economics.”

Theodorou knows his history well, tracing the criminality of cannabis back to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst publishing fictitious stories claiming that cannabis gave racial minorities superhuman powers, turning them violent, all in an effort to prevent hemp from replacing the Hearst-owned paper. Thus, “reefer madness” was born.

That “reefer madness” stigma has continued, Theodorou argues, through the over-criminalization of cannabis to benefit the U.S.’s for-profit prison system.

“I digress,” he says. “That’s the larger conversation I’m determined to have. I want to have, sorry for the pun, but not sorry — higher learning — both in the reason why things are and why we need to combat that.”

By erasing the stigma surround cannabis, Theodorou hopes to shift the way people think about it. He wants to get away the “lazy stoner” stereotypes, and get closer to recognizing the medicinal benefits of cannabis.

“I look at it as a medicine, first and foremost,” he says.

Beyond just using his platform and voice to shift the conversation surrounding cannabis, Theodorou intends to affect substantive change in athletic commissions and anti-doping agencies — the same commissions and agencies that prevented him from using prescribed medical cannabis as a UFC fighter. As he continues to compete and challenge the restrictions surrounding cannabis in sport, he hopes to pave the way for other athletes to use medically-prescribed cannabis just like any other medication.

“The number one priority is to win, win in everything I’m doing,” Theodorou says. “And that’s winning in the cage and winning outside because they’re both fights. One has bigger implications in regards to sports and other athletes.”

“Whether you win or lose in any direction, you just gotta pick yourself up and go, and that’s what I’ve always done,” he says. Indeed, following a devastating blow to his career as a professional athlete, Theodorou is quickly picking himself up and focusing himself in a new direction.

Theodorou is optimistic about his new direction. Of course, he’s disappointed with the loss to Brunson and departure from the UFC but is quick to recognize new doors that those defeats have opened.

“The ability to achieve greatness in any aspect is the risk of failure,” he says, reminiscing how his life has changed in the past four months. “The only reason things taste sweet is the opportunity of a sour alternative, and the alternative is losing.”