Daniel Cormier and Stipe Miocic are going to fight this weekend! It will be the first clash between two active UFC champions in years! Fans have endured barren cards in places like Utica and Singapore while waiting for this genuine superfight! It should be great! Unless of course, uh, Daniel Cormier can’t fight because he hurt himself tripping over something on stage after the press conference last night.
Cormier told Ariel Helwani that he didn’t hear a pop when he went down, and that he was icing his leg overnight. He told Helwani he was “confident the fall would not hinder his ability to perform,” and I truly hope he is not practicing any gamesmanship, because far too many good UFC fights have been canceled recently. The Cormier-Miocic fight is perhaps the best bout that the company has scheduled for 2018, and losing it would be a gross overreach by the MMA gods.
Here’s how bad it’s been: The co-main event on this UFC 226 card was canceled after Max Holloway picked up a concussion this week; Tony Ferguson pulled out of his fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 223 after tripping and tearing his knee; Ferguson’s replacement, Max Holloway, then got pulled from that card due to an unholy weight cut; Michael Chiesa was hurt in Conor McGregor’s bus attack and could fight neither Khabib nor Anthony Pettis; Robert Whittaker missed his first title defense against Luke Rockhold in January, and Yoel Romero missed weight by 2.7 pounds after stepping up to fight Rockhold instead; Frankie Edgar pulled out of a title challenge against Max Holloway in March. These have not been the only fights that have fallen apart because of bad luck, injuries, and weight cutting problems, and at this point, being a UFC fan requires you to hold your breath and never trust that any booked fight will actually take place until the two competitors actually step into the octagon.
All of which is to say, I really hope Daniel Cormier’s leg is not fucked!