UFC lightweight Joe Lauzon has no sympathy for Charles Oliveira, who missed weight ahead of UFC 274 by half a pound, and in doing so was stripped of his title. Lauzon, appearing on The MMA Hour, simply warned Oliveira not to be “so freaking big!”
“I think it sucks, but what are you going to do?
How do you go and make an exception for that? You know you’re supposed to make ‘55 on the nose. I don’t know when they checked their weight, they could have checked their weight at 5 a.m. and just not worried about it, [but] I think you have to be ready. You have to be ready to make an adjustment. If I was a half pound over, I would have made the extra weight.
Joe Lauzon to Charles Oliveira: “don’t be so freaking big!”
Maybe this is a cautionary tale. Don’t be so freaking big! Don’t have such hard weight cuts. This is the reality of it. You want to be as big as you can, but there’s too big, and you need to be ready for that.”
Weight cutting has long been somewhat controversial in the world of combat sports. The general consensus is that pretty much every pro fighter cuts some weight in order to fight, but there are some who cut more than others. Charles Oliveira, ahead of UFC 274, claimed to have made weight with his own scale, and his team insists to this day that the UFC’s official scale was faulty. Lauzon isn’t buying it. He made 155 the same day, he says, because he was diligent.
“I know what my scale is going to be. I have my scale with me the entire week. I check my weight four or five times a day. I’m checking my weight nonstop. I checked my weight five times from when I woke up to when I stepped on the scale. I knew exactly where I was. At 4 a.m., I woke up, I checked my weight. I peed, I checked my weight. I pooped, I checked my weight. I peed again, I checked my weight. I checked my weight all the time. That’s what you do.
They were posting on Thursday night, saying they were on weight, which is awesome. That’s what I try to do. I went to bed at ‘56.6 on Thursday night. I was confident I was going to sleep it off, but when I woke up at 4am, I checked my weight, I knew I was good. I wasn’t worried about it. You don’t just check your weight and are like, ‘Oh, I’m good,’ and never check it again. You check it nonstop.”
Do you think Joe Lauzon is being too harsh on Charles Oliveira? Let us know in the comments.
