Daniel Cormier nearly died from a weight cut nine years ago. On Friday, people nearly died laughing after a Daniel Cormier weight cut.
The UFC light heavyweight champion tipped the scales at 206.2 for his Saturday night title defense against Anthony “Rumble” Johnson, himself no stranger to weight-cutting issues. Just 144 seconds after his failure to make the proscribed limit of 205 pounds, DC returned to the scale shortly before the expiration of the commission-imposed time cutoff. He miraculously hit the weight limit on the nose. Strangely, when Johnson, a former welterweight who boasts a win at heavyweight over a former UFC champion, took to the scales the reading registered 203.8, precisely 1.2 pounds below the limit—the same amount Cormier “lost” in less than three minutes.
Rather than scale skullduggery, ESPN’s Brett Okamoto takes a crack at solving the case of the missing weight by pointing to a pay-not-attention-to-the-curtain prevarication.
“Cormier (18-1), who cuts a good amount of weight to compete at 205 pounds, may have used an old wrestling trick to lose 1.2 pounds in such a short amount of time,” Okamoto writes. “During the second weigh-in, UFC officials held a towel out in front of Cormier, who had stripped off all his clothes. Cormier clearly pushed down on the towels, which would presumably offset his weight slightly.”
Fighters employ unusual measures to make weight. Desmond Green, fighting on UFC 210’s undercard, once described to Breitbart Sports how he cut his dreadlocks to make weight. Cormier wished such an option existed for him at the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008. He made the 211.5-pound limit. Then his kidneys failed. The medical event prevented him from competing and nearly killed him.
That Daniel Cormier competed in his twenties rather than his thirties. And he did so at a weight limit nearly seven pounds higher than the one he encountered on Friday. A bowling-ball-of-a-guy who did not look outsized in dispatching Frank Mir, Antonio “Big Foot” Silva, and Josh Barnett—none exactly small for their division—at heavyweight appears like a skeleton at the scales as a light heavyweight.
But even Skelator Cormier initially failed to make weight. His Daniel Cormier Diet, surely now as in-demand as anything peddled by Jenny Craig, shed more than a pound in less than a commercial break. At that rate, the Daniel Cormier Diet figures to lose fatties 50 pounds every two hours. Alas, like most get-slim-quick products, the diet wins its fair share of skeptics seeing it as snake oil. But people watching scales, whether athletic commissions or unathletic gargantuans, see what they want to see.
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