Kurt Angle says Jeff Hardy is a month sober, was intoxicated at TNA PPV

A pre-recorded interview with Kurt Angle was aired on "Busted Open Radio" on Sportsnation 2 (Sirius channel 92/XM channel 207) on Monday.  Most notably, he was pretty open about Jeff Hardy showing up "in no condition to perform" at the TNA Victory Road PPV on March 13th and being sent home after a disastrous match with Sting:

That was an unfortunate situation where I think Jeff realizes it now. Whatever he did...this is something that's been talked about many times. Jeff made a mistake. If he was going to take any form of, let's say, sleep medication... he probably should've waited an hour before he did that. Jeff made a bad decision and he's learned from it.

[...]

Jeff has been clean for the last month and he wants to come back and he's ready to come back and I believe that he won't make that mistake it again. But it did happen. I felt really bad. I felt bad for TNA, I felt bad for Jeff, I felt bad for the company. Jeff Hardy is an amazing wrestler. I have nothing bad to say about him, actually I love the kid. I wrestled Jeff at his best and I wrestled Jeff at his worst, and it's night and day.

Given Angle's history, it's not a surprise that there's a level of denial and weirdness there, but he was a lot more open than I would expect.  I wouldn't have expected any TNA wrestler to outright say Jeff Hardy was intoxicated during the match.  Still, Angle brushing it off as a simple mistake ("If he was going to take any form of, let's say, sleep medication... he probably should've waited an hour before he did that."  No, of course he shouldn't have gotten high before his match.) is ridiculous, yet, once again, not surprising given his history.

Plus, it's not the first time this happened with Hardy.  He was almost sent home from the Final Resolution PPV in December but was allowed to work when he swore it was jet lag and that he felt better.  Not long after that, TNA's Bill Behrens said on his podcast that he was told by TNA wrestlers that Hardy had been sent to the ring while impaired more than once and speculated that this could have contributed to Hardy concussing Ken Anderson with a chairshot to the back of the head that had been intended for his back.

That doesn't even take into account Hardy's first WWE run ending when he refused to go to rehab after a series of embarrassing performances, his first TNA run ending when he no-showed numerous TV tapings and PPVs, his two drug test failures during his second WWE run, being stopped from boarding an airplane due to intoxication late in that run, being arrested on drug charges two weeks after he left WWE, and shooting a video for his brother's online reality show where accused CM Punk (who had just cut a promo on WWE TV making fun of the arrest) of taking Ambien while clearly intoxicated, repeatedly rubbing his nose, and bragging about his drug use.  The last one is my personal favorite for the amazing lack of plausible deniability.