Marvin Vettori isn’t buying Paulo Costa’s explanation for not making weight.
Marvin Vettori won his UFC light heavyweight debut this weekend in the main event of UFC Vegas 41. He hadn’t planned to fight at 205 lbs, but when Paulo Costa told the world he had no chance of making the middleweight limit Vettori and the UFC worked with the Brazilian to ensure the fight would go ahead.
Since then Costa has claimed that a bicep injury threw off his weigh cut. At the post-fight press conference Vettori wasn’t buying that excuse.
“Fucking hell, can’t you run with a bicep tear to make weight,’ said Vettori (ht MMA Fighting). “What is that? What is that excuse? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.
“No, [I don’t believe him]. You can do pretty much everything with a bicep tear, anyway. It doesn’t have anything to do with the weight. You could’ve said, ‘I couldn’t throw anything with my right hand because of my bicep tear,’ but not, ‘I couldn’t make weight with a bicep tear.’”
It’s common for fighters to gain mutual respect for one another after they meet in the cage. However, it doesn’t sound like Vettori has much fondness for his recent opponent.
“He’s full of shit to be honest,” he said. “I don’t like how he carried himself. Nah, I mean, if I see him right now, I probably won’t jump him. But I won’t share a glass of nothing [with him]. Fuck it. You f*cking go your way, I’ll go my way. You fucking lost, you’re gonna give me 30 percent of your purse, now go run, fat ass.”
Vettori added that Costa, whom he called a “cry baby”, should have forfeited 50 percent of his purse for not being able to make the middleweight limit. He also accused Costa of trying to get out of the fight altogether.
“In my mind, I thought this guy wanted out of the fight because he’s not ready. My rational mind was saying, ‘You can’t think that way because it could all be a fucking trap.’ I can definitely see that he was ready to scratch the fight, because I don’t think a lot of people would have gone up that much weight, but at the same time if I do accept, I’m all in. I can’t expect him to not be ready. So it was weird on my side, too, because I had to stay completely focused, even on him making all this shit where he looked like he wasn’t ready.
“I had people all the time telling me, ‘He’s not ready, he wants out of the fight, he doesn’t want to be here.’ You saw the performance, he came game. He wasn’t out of shape.”
Vettori’s win over Costa advanced the Italian’s record to 18-5-1. His previous fight was a unanimous decision loss to UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya. That loss snapped a five fight winning streak for Vettori.