Filed under: Fighting, FanHouse Exclusive, News
As Hermes Franca waited for the decision of his fight against Ferrid Kheder to be read inside the cage in a Cartago, Costa Rica high school gym, the UFC veteran thought his losing streak was history. Instead, to him, it was the beginning of something even worse than defeat.
If it was a simple loss, Franca could have handled it, but what happened next could not be so easily settled in his mind. According to some, Franca was simply the victim of a bad decision. But according to others, he was robbed, the victim of a fix.
“This is like a bad joke,” Franca told MMA Fighting. “It’s unbelievable. I won the fight. The judges gave it to me. I got my hand raised. And then they said I didn’t win.”
“What happened was confusion,” said Jean-Francois Billon, who helped organize the show. “It’s a big story for a little thing. Nobody had bad intentions. Nobody was cheating.”
What started out as a fight in the cage became a fight for the truth.