GSP says fight delay due to eye issue

UFC welterweight G.O.A.T. Georges St-Pierre spoke recently with Justin Kingsley at the C2 Montreal conference on Friday, and explained why he recently said he would be ready to fight after October, when in March at a press conference he declared he would be challenging UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping.

“Trust me, I’m not the kind of guy who thinks, ‘Hey, I’m going to make everybody wait for me. I don’t want to fight during the summer, I want to take my time …,'” said GSP, as transcribed by Ariel Helwani for MMA Fighting. “That’s not the reason. If it were up to me, I would come back. The reason is I had a problem with my eye. I had an injury.”

“My vision has not been back yet. It will be back. It’s something very minor. The doctor insisted for me that I don’t spar until September.”

“The UFC was aware of it. They knew I couldn’t fight during the summer, but they still insisted on doing that press conference with Michael Bisping. And when it happened, we were not very excited about the idea, but we wanted that fight, so we decided to do it, but then it turned into a negative thing because it took so long.

“But UFC knew. Everyone knew. The people concerned knew that that was the case, but they still tried to put pressure on me to fight in July. That’s the reason why I’m coming out public today about the reason why I’m not fighting this summer.”

“I always said that if I was coming back to fight, it needed to be a fight that excites me. I wanted to fight Michael Bisping because I wanted to fight someone that could elevate me. Michael Bisping is the champion now, and I think that he could elevate me as much as I could elevate him. I’m taking a huge risk coming back. I’m putting my legacy on the line.”

UFC president Dana White declared that as GSP was out, and Bisping said his knee needed more time to recover that Yoel Romero and Robert Whittaker would fight for the Interim middleweight title. Bisping will then in all likelihood fight the winner.