UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, who was supposed to fight Fabricio Werdum on this Saturday’s UFC 180 card, was forced out of the bout with a ruptured MCL and torn meniscus.
With Velasquez’ absence, Mark Hunt stepped up to fight Werdum for the interim heavyweight championship on short notice.
Velasquez joined Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour to discuss the origin of his injury, and how it devastated him.
“I’ve been through this before, so it sucks, but it’s something that I have to do for my career. I tried everything I could do to make the fight, and I just couldn’t.”
Leading up to the bout, Velasquez had been training with the injury, with plans to baby his knee during camp in preparation for the fight, but ultimately was unable to do so, and was forced to undergo surgery.
“I felt (like my knee) was pretty loose. In training I felt like my body would switch one way but my leg would kinda stay in one direction. So I kinda felt like, it wasn’t stable.
“It just sucked, you know what I mean. Going through practice everyday, and just limiting (myself), not really doing the stuff that I could do as far as rolling. I tried to roll, some days I could, some days I couldn’t, and I just said, hey, I’m going to just baby it until I get two weeks out, and once I get two weeks out I’m going to try to do everything. Kick, be on the ground, it doesn’t matter, but I’m going to do what I can to make the fight.
“And when I finally realized that I can’t do it, it’s just not working for me, it just sucked. It felt like something was destined, you know what I mean. Like, this is where I’m destined to be, I’m destined to fight on this card, and it just didn’t turn out that way. So it was just kind of devastating to me.”