UFC 213 suffered a sudden loss in its main event last night. Hours before the fight, UFC bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes pulled out of the night’s main event title fight rematch with Valentina Shevchenko. Now UFC President Dana White has come forward with his thoughts on the situation.
In an interview with MMA Fighting, White explained “Leading up to [Friday’s] ceremonial weigh-ins, I got a call that she wasn’t feeling well, and it was questionable whether she was going to show up to the ceremonials. Because the doctor needed to see her and they needed to find out what was going on with her, so, she does them, everything’s good.”
“This morning, I wake up and I hear that she’s not feeling well again,” White continued. “And … she’s not feeling well again and she’s probably not going to fight. So, I asked the doctors what’s wrong with her. She was medically cleared. She was physically OK, they found nothing wrong with her, but she didn’t feel right.
“It’s not like she was like ‘I’m absolutely refusing to fight,’ She said ‘I don’t feel right, I don’t feel good.’ I think that it was 90 percent mental and maybe 10 percent physical, I think a lot of fighters have had times where they don’t feel right.
“These situations arise all the time,” White later added. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation like today, though, where she was physically capable of fighting.”
“I won’t do that again,” he said. “I won’t headline with that title again.”
