Feature: Cage Warriors shameless in pursuit of MMA event during COVID-19 crisis

Cage Warriors

Karim Zidan delves into Cage Warriors’ bizarre decision to host an MMA event during the coronavirus crisis threatening the United Kingdom. 

Despite the United Kingdom’s government considering a partial lockdown to minimize the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic, Cage Warriors is still planning to move forward with its MMA event on March 20 in Manchester.

The event — dubbed Cage Warriors 113 — will be headlined by a middleweight bout between Darren Stewart and Bartosz Fabinski that was originally scheduled for UFC London on Saturday before that event was indefinitely postponed due to travel restrictions caused by the pandemic. The show will also feature a vacant lightweight title fight between Mason Jones and Joe McColgan.

“The Cage Warriors team is working around-the-clock to get this done,” said Cage Warriors President Graham Boylan. “After everything they’ve been through, the fighters deserve to compete. After all the support they’ve shown us, the fans deserve some calm amongst the chaos. We’re determined to provide the world with a seriously exciting night of MMA this Friday.”

While Boylan has framed his event as a distraction from the ongoing pandemic, his efforts to defy government advice and health recommendations means he is more likely to contribute to the problem than alleviate it. This article will attempt to explain why Cage Warriors’s reckless event should be considered an added threat to public safety, especially as Britain braces for the possibility of hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of the pandemic.

UK’s Coronavirus Crisis

On Thursday morning, Transport of London announced that it would close up to 40 underground stations and begin limiting its service within 24 hours. The government also announced that up to 10,000 military personnel will be placed on standby throughout the UK in order to maintain public services in the coming months.

The latest development comes in the wake of the chilling report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team on the necessary public health measures needed to suppress the spread of COVID-19. The analysis suggested that the best-case scenario — one that involves drastic measures to mitigate the spread of the disease — could still lead to approximately 260,000 deaths in the UK. This has lead officials to begin discussing options for suppressing the outbreak through population-wide social distancing, home isolation, school and university closures among other steps. These policies will likely need to be in place long enough until vaccines are available, which could take 18 months.

“The world is facing the most serious public health crisis in generations. Here we provide concrete estimates of the scale of the threat countries now face.” said Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the government’s top coronavirus experts and co-author of the report, “We use the latest estimates of severity to show that policy strategies which aim to mitigate the epidemic might halve deaths and reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds, but that this will not be enough to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. More intensive, and socially disruptive interventions will therefore be required to suppress transmission to low levels. It is likely such measures – most notably, large scale social distancing – will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available.”

Professor Ferguson has since gone into self isolation after developing coronavirus symptoms. He tweeted that he has a persistent cough and high fever and later stated that he was probably infectious when he attended a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday.

“I’ve been in so many meetings in the last few weeks, and a number of my colleagues from other universities who have been advising the government in those meetings have also developed symptoms.” Professor Ferguson told BBC Radio 4. “I have to say central London is the hotspot in the UK at the moment. There almost certainly are thousands of cases in central London, so it’s not that surprising. I’ve been in lots of meetings and contacting lots of people.”

Professor Ferguson was one of the co-authors of the Imperial College report that helped dramatically shift the UK government’s policy on dealing with the pandemic. Prior to the report, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and some of his chief advisors revealed that they would adopt a different strategy and stop tracking each suspected case, instead testing only those admitted to hospitals. They pushed the “herd immunity” concept, which promotes the letting the disease run its own course in order to infect enough people to create a level of group immunity. The chief science adviser to the UK government, Patrick Vallance, said the country needed to “build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.”

The supposed plan came under immediate and heavy criticism from scientists and other nations, as herd immunity was typically generated through vaccination, not a stiff upper lip mentality towards lethal diseases. As Johnson and his government realized their mistake, they backtracked and changed strategies. However, it appears as though their mistake will cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.

And yet, while the UK braces itself for widespread site closures in an attempt to suppress the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Cage Warriors held its pre-fight weigh-ins on Thursday.

According to a press release, the promotion held three separate pre-fight weigh-ins throughout the day with only one team member allowed alongside a fighter during that competitor’s weigh-in time slot. Cage Warriors added that all athletes were checked for symptoms of COVID-19 by an “on-site medic.” All fighters and staff will be checked again on fight night prior to entering the arena.

Though the promotion claimed these measures were safety precautions” it should be noted that carriers of the coronavirus can be asymptomatic for several days after being exposed to the virus and still be contagious to those around them. A new study from China even suggested that asymptomatic people spread COVID-19 the most. That means that Cage Warriors’ supposed precautions are little more than thinly veiled attempts to minimize criticism against their decision to move ahead with the event.

Not only are the 22 fighters, staff, and officials involved in the Cage Warriors 113 event now at risk of being exposed to COVID-19, they will also have to travel back home to their families thereafter, potentially passing on the contagion to several other people along the way. This would have been entirely avoidable had Cage Warriors taken the simple decision to pay their fighters their show money and insist they stay at home. Instead, the promotion’s president decided to use this opportunity to gain notoriety in European sports.

“We’re going to keep it behind closed doors, we’re going to be washing hands, keeping distancing,” Boylan told the Eurobash podcast. “It will take tanks, trucks and lots of men with guns to stop this event going on.”