(Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images North America)
Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White is currently in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in anticipation of tonight’s UFC 142: Aldo vs. Mendes event at the HSBC Arena.
Despite all of the focus on the promotions second Brazil event in just six months, White naturally was inundated with questions from the media about when the UFC was returning to Brazil as well as news on other planned events.
White did confirm a date for the promotions third FOX event, targeting May 5 for UFC on FOX 3 show but did not offer a location for that show.
The UFC president told MMAjunkie.com that “May 5 is the date we’re holding for FOX. It has been for a while…. when you’re picking dates, you’ve got boxing, NFL, playoffs, college basketball. You’ve got everything. Every other sport that’s going on, everything that 18-to-34-year-olds are watching, there’s something else out there that’s going to compete with us. But it is what it is. If we sat around and stayed away from dates, we’d never go.”
When it came to identifying the UFC’s next Brazilian event, White spoke about heading to Sao Paulo for that next show saying the promotion is looking at a date in June and that they were hoping to make it a stadium event.
The UFC’s first stadium event took place last April in Toronto, Ontario and drew 55,724 fans to the Rogers Centre. The promotion would likely want to break that record in Sao Paulo, but the cities biggest stadium is undergoing renovations in anticipation of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.