Jan Blachowicz has a unique pre-fight ritual which includes touching a rope he got from a hanged man he found in a forest.
“‘When you find a hanged man, you take his rope for luck,” Blachowicz said on his YouTube channel (via MMAFighting). “‘That’s what people believed in the old days.’ I checked the internet, and sure enough, that is exactly what people thought and believed in. If you don’t believe me, check for yourself.”
According to some newspapers in Europe, what Blachowicz is saying is actually true.
“In the 1880s, it was apparently not unusual for Parisian medical students to sell bits of the rope that were still attached around the necks of suicides brought into the hospitals,” according to the paper “Executing Magic in the Modern Era: Criminal Bodies and the Gallows in Popular Medicine,” which was published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. “One report tells of a piece given to a chemist’s assistant in Amiens, who then went on to win one hundred thousand francs in a lottery.”
“There was huge demand in Paris for hanging rope as a lucky charm, it reported, noting that French gamblers and the superstitious had to rely on suicides for pieces,” the paper adds.
Jan Blachowicz is set to fight Dominick Reyes in the co-main event of UFC 253 for the vacant light heavyweight title. It is a very intriguing matchup and Blachowicz has kept the tradition for this fight. Although he has done it his whole career, and talked to the UFC about it, they have never used it in the pre-fight interviews.
“Maybe the UFC also had the same problem with the sound, I need to ask them about that,” he said. “That’s some ‘Paranormal Activity’ stuff right there.”
What do you make of Jan Blachowicz’s story about touching the rope from a hanged man?