MMA fighter Radek Roušal was banned from fighting in Czech organization Oktagon MMA due to his neo-Nazi tattoos he has on his body.
Roušal was ready to make his professional MMA debut for the organization, but due to the officials finding out about his tattoos, the bout was ultimately cancelled. The tattoos consisted of a SS officer and another one of Adolph Hitler. Roušal said that he received the tattoos during a time in his life when he was young and lost.
“I grew up in a problematic community of people that gave rise to this tattoo,” he explained. “At that time, I did not know what to do with life, I was young and this tattoo was stupid. Later, I started doing martial arts, which led me to a completely different life and view of the world. I have more tattoos that I regret, I’ll gradually re-tattoo them all.” (Transcribed by MMANews)
The promoter of the organization, Ond?ej Novotný out about Radek Roušal’s problematic tattoos
“This doesn’t exist for you come up to us and look like this,” Novotný told idnes.cz. “We have it in the contract, we could give him a fine. Even on the chest, he has (apparently the cap of an SS officer, the skull could also refer to the Death Skull Unit of the SS organization responsible for managing the extermination camps). Whatsoever!… We didn’t study what it looked like, nor did the photographers and cameramen notice. No one had talked about it before… We didn’t know about it, certainly not.”
Roušal’s controversial tattoos have been in the process of being covered up and tattooed over. The neo-Nazi tattoo’s should have been the first to get covered up and probably would have been most people’s first choice to be covered up if they had the tattoos. The promoter Novotný agrees with that as well.
““He explained it to me,” adds Novotný. “I told him he was crazy. I’m not a tattoo expert, but how long can it take to re-tattoo this? Two days? It’s nice that he basically distanced himself from it, I trust him and I’m able to understand everything, but this is not and it can be done faster.”
Roušal is currentyl 0-0 as a professional MMA fighter and is 0-1 as a kickboxer. Whether he will get another shot is yet to be seen, but he isn’t the first fighter to talk about his neo-Nazi past (but is one of the only fighters to document it on his skin). Sean Strickland recently opened up about his hateful past as well. He despises the person he was then, and blamed his environment for his thinking and actions as well.