Cormier: Injury was MY fault, not AKA’s, coach works for me

AKA under the direction of Javier Mendes is one of the greatest fight gyms on Earth. It has also long received criticism for a high injury rate. In April of 2015, Mendes said there were significant changes underway at AKA with regards to injury rates. However, when AKA stars Daniel Cormier and Luke Rockhold both got hurt recently and pulled out of fights, the criticism returned.

During a recent appearance on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, Cormier said forcefully that the latest injury was his fault, and not AKA’s.

“It’s not Javier’s fault,” said Cormier, as transcribed byMarc Raimondi for MMA Fighting. “This isn’t college. We’re not high-school athletes. Javier can tell me not to spar and I’ll be like, ‘Yeah sure, Jav.’ And then I’ll go spar.

“People always get confused. They talk about coaches. The reality is, these coaches and managers that everybody thinks are in so much control, they work for us. They’re our employees.”

“The decisions are mine. If I got hurt, it was my fault.”

Further, Cormier said that the gyms new focus on injury prevention led him to have doubts as he stepped in the Octagon the last time, vs. Anderson Silva.

“How can you train if you’re constantly worried about getting injured? Guys play basketball and get hurt and that’s probably the easiest sport on the planet,” said Cormier. “We’re actually fighting every day. We’re wrestling, we’re grappling.”

“I was like worried. Like, man did I run enough? Did I put enough miles in? Did I spar enough rounds? And you don’t want to be questioning yourself. That was supposed to be Jon Jones.”

“For me, I felt a little bit off. I felt like I didn’t do as much as I needed to do and it really messed with me mentally. Now, I spar a lot and I run a lot and I train a lot. It’s the only way that I feel secure in my own mind.”

“It was a huge mistake and I didn’t like it. It’s unfair to think that we can do what we do with the intensity that we do it and expect injuries to not happen.”

The sport now faces a major challenge. How do you balance the risk of doing everything you can to prepare and potentially getting hurt, against the risk of being too safe and potentially losing?