Apart from the huge deal surrounding the failed drug tests, there’s another, much smaller issue in UFC 183, the weight missing by two of the fighters, and quite big names at that, Kelvin Gastelum and John Lineker.

For a long time I’ve wondered why fighters are fighting at a lower weight than the one that they walk around with, and how did it come to be.

The answer to the first question, of course, is that everybody has better chances when fighting smaller guys, and so, everybody tries to pass as small as they can themselves. The reason they can do this is because they have 24 hours before the fight starts to rehydrate and recuperate from the weakened state they are in at the time of the weigh ins.

I don’t know why fighters are weighed in more than 24 hours before the fight, though. I guess that in the beginning (of Boxing) it had something to do with the option of finding a replacement for the fighter or for canceling the show before the crowd got there.  But nowadays neither of these is the case.  Fights are still made even if one or both fighters do miss weight.

So why is it still going on? Is it a health issue? These days, fighters lose so much weight for fights that their body is very weak at the time of the weigh ins.  If they would try to fight at this weakened state it would probably prove to be very dangerous for them.  Looking at it this way, it might make sense not to let them fight right after a weigh in, when they are particularly weak.

But I don’t believe that this is right way of looking at it.  Fighters lose all this weight and fight at weight classes smaller than their regular weight because they know they have those 24 hours to recuperate. The situation now is the dangerous one, since fighters are dehydrating themselves to extreme levels, sometimes to the point where their bodies just shut down.  We see it time and time again, and there is no reason to think we’ll ever stop seeing that.  Fighters will always try to fight in as small a weight class as possible and will always continue to hurt themselves in the process of trying to make that weight, counting on the 24 hour period after the weigh in for recuperation.

If, on the other hand, weigh ins would be held minutes (yes, minutes) before a fight, so fighters would have no time to recuperate from a weight loss, fighters would know that they can’t fight at a weight class lighter than their natural weight since if they do they will be weak during the fight, which is the most important time to be as strong as possible. fighters would, then, try to keep the weight pretty even, at the weight they would fight in, throughout the entire training camp because they wouldn’t want to need to lose almost any weight right before the fight which would make them weak.

This way fighters would fight at a weight much closer to their walk-around weight and there would, practically, be no health dangers surrounding the weight cut, and, of course much less weight misses.

I thought I’d take the latest drug test failures as an excuse for taking a foray into the subjective side of MMA mixed with some opinion and philosophy, something we don’t commonly do here.

When I think of PEDs in sports, the first thing that comes to mind (chronologically) is a group gathering I had with some friends circa-2001.  Realize, this was before “the cream” and “the clear”, before BALCO made the headlines and before Lance Armstrong taught us that cycling is a “dirty” sport.  At this point, we had just gotten past the discovery of those pills with the really long name that Mark McGwire had in his locker.  As we watched whatever sport we were watching, I turn to the room and say something to the effect of: “I bet most of these guys are juicing.”  After saying this, I almost got laughed out of the room.  OK, it wasn’t that bad, it was more like, “Yeah right, you just wish you were that big.”

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Sometimes fights are stopped too early and sometimes too late. In a perfect world, of course, all fights would have been stopped exactly on time.  But realistically judges usually have to decide (in a split second) between stopping the fight or letting it continue when the fighter seem to be really hurt but might still be able to continue.

The upside of stopping the fight at that point is that of the protecting the safety of the fighters, while the down side is that of stopping a potentially intriguing and important fight, robbing the fans of it’s entertainment value and maybe changing the rightful outcome of the fight, thus disrupting the whole true rankings and future fight schedule.

When should a judge, then, err on the side of caution and should he let the fight continue to a more definitive outcome?

The answer, in my opinion, primarily depends on the significance of the fight.

Yes, we all think that all fights should be judged exactly the same, like we think all fighters should be treated the same. But this is not the reality. Top fighters earn differently and get different treatment from promoters and athletic commissions, and main events get 5 rounds even when they are not title fights. The point is that top fights are much more important than all other fights. These are the fights that the fans care about the most by far, these are the fights that are most important for the sport and these are the fights that are most important for the fighters.

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