Dustin Poirier reveals he also dealt with some lingering pain after his UFC 264 headliner with Conor McGregor.
As we all know by now, Conor McGregor injured his left shinbone at UFC 264. It caused the anticlimactic end of his headliner fight with Dustin Poirier as he now deals with a lengthy time on the sidelines.
What we don’t know is that Poirier also left the fight with lingering pain. As he said during his brief appearance on American Top Team’s Punchin’ In podcast, it was the first time he ended fight week dealing with that kind of soreness.
“I’ve been checked by a lot of heavy kickers, never before have I left fight week and been sore just on my actual bone,” he explained. “Like, the knee. My knee was sore. Not my thigh or calf, my knee was sore.”
The exact moment when McGregor injured his leg was never made clear, but there have been theories. Poirier gave a little bit of insight into what happened during those moments.
“There was one kick, I turned my knee out a little bit. I didn’t fully check it, I didn’t have my weight like a traditional check. I knew that was a bad one for him. I knew that one hurt him bad,” he recalled.
“I think it was on top of his foot, but you never know if that could’ve caused a torque on his shinbone and cracked it, I don’t know. He was throwing hard kicks, and a lot of them were hitting my knee.
“And I didn’t get to, like I said, traditionally check the kicks, but I did turn my knee out. And it was bone on bone and it was worse for him.”
Poirier may have dealt with that sore knee for the first time in his career, but he says there was still one other fighter that left him badly compromised from leg kicks.
“Gaethje, probably. He partially tore my quad.
“And in the fight, him not caring about position and throwing kicks as hard as he can just to land them, not worried about the repercussion.”
Poirier will now face Charles Oliveira for the undisputed lightweight title sometime towards the end of the year. McGregor, meanwhile, just signed up for a wheelchair boxing match against impressionist Al Foran.