American Top Team coach Mike Brown spills the beans on what caused Jorge Masvidal’s UFC 269 withdrawal.
Last month, Colby Covington spoke to Submission Radio to reveal the possible reason for Jorge Masvidal’s UFC 269 withdrawal. At the time, all that was said was that “Gamebred” suffered an “undisclosed injury,” but his former close training partner gave some specifics.
“He fractured his ribs last Saturday in training, and yeah, he’s fragile and he had to pull out of the fight,” Covington said of Masvidal. “It’s too bad that people still love me over at his gym more than they even love him.”
“He went to sparring at the gym and gets his ribs fractured, leaves the gym crying and, you know, goes to the doctor and gets the x-ray, and they determine it’s fractured ribs. He’s a fragile little bitch. He’s a brittle little bitch.”
As it turned out, the former interim champ was right. In a recent pre-fight sitdown with ESPN, American Top Team coach Mike Brown confirmed that Masvidal did suffer a rib injury, a cartilage tear, to be exact.
“Jorge was training like crazy, man. This guy was back to the laboratory as always, working his ass off. He was in shape, he was ready, I feel like we were just starting to begin to peak for the fight a little bit,” Brown said.
“I don’t know how many weeks we were out, maybe four weeks out. He got a pretty good cartilage tear in the ribs. Had a pretty tough rib injury, and it was significant where you’re not gonna be training for like four to six weeks when you have a major tear like that.
“So it was gonna be impossible to go through with the fight at that point. We had to cut it.”
Masvidal was slated to face Leon Edwards in a grudge match at UFC 269’s main card. The event takes place this Saturday at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas to close out the UFC’s PPV shows for the year.