If there was any doubt that the UFC was going to bury Jose Aldo for withdrawing from UFC 189, this clears out a lot of it. While Jose Aldo and his camp have held steadfast in their report that Aldo’s rib is broke, the UFC president is telling a very different story. White spoke to MMAFighting about the injury stating that the x-rays Aldo provided didn’t show a fractured rib, but instead a calcified injury that had been re-aggravated. He also made it clear that the injury itself wasn’t pushing Aldo out of the fight instead, it was Aldo’s fear that he would be unable to make weight with the injury hampering him.
Must Reads
Must Reads
“So what happened was, when the pictures went out onto the internet, right, and you saw this rib down here, that was an old injury,” the UFC president said. “That was an old injury that was calcified white. The real injury was the bruised rib and cartilage. He had a bruised rib and cartilage. And the big problem for Aldo in taking the fight, wasn’t the fight. It was making weight.
“He had to cut something like 24 pounds, and if he couldn’t physically do it the way that he does it, he was afraid that he couldn’t make weight,” White continued. “That was really the issue. But he did not have a broken rib. It was a bruise. Every x-ray he sent out was of an old injury. What you saw right there on his body was an old injury, not a new injury.
“It wasn’t UFC doctors (who cleared him), either. It was three different doctors.”
White’s comments were echoed by UFC medical consultant Jeff Davidson in recent comments to Yahoo Sports:
“What happens a lot of the time is the cartilage gets calcified from an old injury, from an injury to the ribs,” said Davidson, whose full-time job is as an emergency room physician. “When cartilage heals, it heals by calcification. If you get injured in that area again, that calcified cartilage can break and can look like a fracture line.”
“But it’s still the cartilage that’s just become a calcified cartilage.”
Davidson went on to say that White’s first words upon hearing the news were to tell Jose Aldo, “We want you to get better and there is no pressure on you to fight. Go do what the doctors tell you and do your therapy and let us know in five or six days how you’re feeling.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Conor McGregor will face Chad Mendes for the interim featherweight title on Saturday, July 11th at the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Last we heard, Jose Aldo is still planning on fighting before the end of the year.
About the author
