Cormier responds to weigh in controversy
Daniel Cormier: “I didn’t even realize I was doing that until I saw pictures, honestly. I’ve got to be completely honest with you.”
UFC light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and discussed his controversial weigh in. With minutes left, he weighed in 1.2 pounds over the 205 title fight weight limit. Less than three minutes later he weighed in again, and was 205 exactly. One possibility is a gravity leak. Another is that Cormier used an old high school wrestling trick – he appeared to be holding onto the towel in the interests of modesty, but was instead pushing down with 1.2 pounds of pressure.
When I got off the scale the first time, I walked away, and they didn’t cover me, said Cormier as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting. So obviously, a guy thinks that he’s losing everything that he’s worked for on the scale, and we just walk back off the scale and nobody even worried about protecting me. So I was like, you know what, I’m going to hold the towel a little bit myself to make sure that I’m covered.
Now, the reality is, I didn’t even realize I was doing that until I saw pictures, honestly. I’ve got to be completely honest with you, I didn’t even realize I was doing that. I was tired. I was very discouraged and upset because of after that had just happened, so I didn’t even realize that I was doing it.
The plot does thicken a bit from here. Anthony Johnson, not known for weighing in light, ended up officially at 203.8, exactly 1.2 pounds under, the exact amount that Cormier “lost.”
Honestly, man, my team was standing with Anthony’s team in the back and they spoke to a couple of his coaches, and they said he been working out and not losing weight, said Cormier. They said that ‘Rumble’ had worked out for like an hour-and-a-half and lost .8 pounds, and they were thinking, ‘this dude ain’t going to make weight either.’ Then he goes in and he’s the exact amount of weight under as I was the second time I stepped on the scale.
So I don’t know what was happening with that scale, but yeah, they were concerned that he wasn’t going to [make it]. He said it himself. He’s like, ‘man, I was in the same situation as you,’ so obviously we both had some issues with our scales, or the commission had a scale issue. I don’t know.
Despite the Johnson camp promise to get the 20% of purse that would be due to Johnson had Cormier missed weight, this one is likely to remain a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma 😉