In the craziest fight cancellation since Kevin Randleman slipped on pipes backstage and knocked himself out of the UFC 24 title defense with Pedro Rizzo, on Friday Renan Barao fainted while cutting weight, and was out of the title fight challenge with TJ Dillashaw at UFC 177.
Unfortunately, this was far from the worst thing to happen due to a weight cut in the sport’s history. Less than a year ago, on September 26, 2013, Sometime Nova Uniao flyweight fighter Leandro “Feijao” Souza, 26, passed away from a stroke while cutting weight for Shooto Brazil 43 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Friends reported Souza had taken the diuretic Furosemide (Lasix) on both the day before and the day of his passing.
Souza had two pounds to go to make weight.
Shortly afterwards, at a UFC World Tour stop in Rio de Janeiro, UFC president Dana White warned against the danger of cutting quickly.
Where you see the dangerous situations are the guys that take last-minute fights and have to lose a ton of weight. It’s never good, said White. I don’t think that the cutting weight process is ever going to be perfect, but… I don’t care what level you fight on, no fight is worth dying over. If you can’t make the weight, don’t take the fight.
In an interview with FOX Sports on Sunday, White again reiterated concern for fighter safety, and respectfully offered some suggestions.
“He was cutting weight and he fainted,” said White. “He fainted and they got freaked out and they did the right thing and they called an ambulance to come get him.”
“First of all you’ve got enough money to get a real nutritionist in there to see what you’re eating, guys got to start doing this the right way to make weight or move to 145 and have Aldo move up to 155, because both of them don’t cut weight that great.”
In a detailed interview with Brazil’s Combate, Barao’s coach, Nova Uniao founder Andre Pederneiras, defended the teams cutting methods.
“There were two pounds left to make 135 and it was still early here in Sacramento, around 1 p.m., and he just had to go down to the arena around 3p.m.,” said Pederneiras as translated by Guilherme Cruz for MMAFighting. “We started the first rounds at the tub and, after approximately 20 minutes, when Barao was leaving the tub, he completely fainted. When he was going down, I held him, but he had so much cream on him, (he slipped) and his head touched the wall. We laid him on the ground but, from that moment on, he stayed out for a long time. That made us really scared. At the same time, we called UFC’s doctor and they called an ambulance.
“When the paramedics came to our room, they checked Barao’s vital signs and decided to take him to the hospital to analyze the situation better. So they had no other option but to give him an IV. When he had to go to the hospital, the UFC had to cancel the fight immediately. It was UFC’s option, and based on Barao’s situation, I saw no way how he could fight. We didn’t want this to happen because Barao trained really hard for three months for this fight. He was really well prepared for this rematch, but we saw this chance slip through our fingers in a situation we can’t control.
“Barao cut weight 10 or 12 times in the UFC and never had any trouble. The process was always done the same way not only with him, but with every other fighter in the gym. We prepare a daily chart and the fighter has to end the night with the same weight he starts the next day. We control everything this way without wearing out the fighter, so we can get to the weigh-in without any trouble.
“After everything that happened, Barao is completely fine right now, at least physically. He didn’t have anything serious, but he’s really sad because he was well trained for this fight. It’s hard to say how well he was because he never fought, right? So it sounds like I’m saying this because he didn’t fight, but no, Renan was really well prepared for this rematch, and we will be for the next fights.
“I told Barao when we left the hospital that we have to give his body a time to rest. He’s young, he’s 27, but he would be fighting his third fight in six months. It’s too much training for his body, the physical and mental preparation. You need some time before starting another training preparation for a fight.
“When we get to Brazil, we will do more exams to evaluate everything and see how he is in every aspect. Then we will sit and talk. People say he should fight at featherweight. I know he’s big for 135, but we have the support of doctors and nutritionists, so I don’t see why changing divisions. What I see is that he needs more time between fights so he doesn’t have to do training camps for five-round fights one after another. His body really needs some rest.
“It’s the first time that it happens with me in 18 years. I’ve been following athletes for a long time and I’ve never had any athlete fainting and being removed from a fight because of it.”
Read entire article… (original Portuguese)
Cutting weight hard had been a staple of collegiate and high school wrestling programs for generations. Then, late in 1997, three wrestlers died in a month. SI had the story:
He died crawling to the scale. Glassy-eyed and pale, his legs too weak to hold him after he had shed nearly 17 pounds in three days, Jeff Reese collapsed and expired on the cold floor of a locker room in Crisler Arena on Dec. 9 in Ann Arbor.
Reese, a junior at Michigan trying to make weight in the 150-pound class for a wrestling meet against Michigan State, spent the last two hours of his life in a plastic suit, riding a stationary bike in a room in which the heat was cranked up to 92. He was the third college wrestler to die in 33 days. Billy Jack Saylor, a freshman at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., and Joseph LaRosa, a senior at Wisconsin-La Crosse, died in November while cutting weight. Though the official causes of their deaths varied, Reese, Saylor and LaRosa died of the same thing: the self-inflicted torture of drastic weight loss, college wrestling’s ugly secret.
In response to the three deaths, the NCAA took a number of steps to make wrestling safer, including:
•Banning training in a room hotter than 80 degrees:
•Banning self-induced vomiting;
•Banning extensive food or fluid restrictions;
•Requiring hydration tests:
•Requiring body fat checks; and,
•Restricting the amount of weight that can be lost.
Following the NCAA’s lead, high schools in the USA too instituted a variety of precautions.
It is incumbent on the regulatory bodies in the sport to step in and make appropriate changes, so that another title fight is not canceled, and above all, so that another death from cutting is not inevitable.
