The former light heavyweight champion details the injury that forced him off UFC 297 and when he’ll return to competition.
Jan Blachowicz’s legendary Polish power has been reduced to that of a 2-year-old girl. That’s according to Blachowicz himself, who is currently on the sidelines preparing for shoulder surgery.
The Polish light heavyweight was on top of the world after UFC 259 in March 2021. He was the 205 pound champion, and he’d just rebuffed middleweight champion Israel Adesanya’s attempt to take his belt. Then Jan lost the title to Glover Teixeira in his next bout, going 1-2-1 up to now. He was hoping to get back on track against Aleksandar Rakic in January, but a slowly building shoulder issue has ended that plan.
“I feel it for like three years, something like this,” Blachowicz said in an interview with BJPENN.com. “I feel pain in my shoulders, but I accept the pain. Last three months, two months, I started losing my power, my strength. 40 percent goes, I tried and do something with physiotherapy and doctors, and they tried to fix it but every training was worse.”
“When I did wrestling, I’d hold someone and they’d just grab my hand and open it like this, too easy. We did an MRI on both shoulders because I feel pain in both of them, and I need to clean it, if I were to clean it, I can come back to training. They said after this, after good recovery, my power will be back. I feel pain, but the pain is okay. The power, I feel like a two-year-old girl, so it’s not possible to prepare for a fight.”
The issue is what led to Blachowicz pulling out of a January rematch against Aleksandar Rakic in Toronto, Canada.
“I wanted to do this fight, but I cannot be ready 100 percent,” he said. “I’m just sad, but as I said, I don’t want to waste my energy thinking about what happened, I have to save this energy for surgery and recovery.”
While Blachowicz was hoping he’d be able to recover in one to two months, he’s realistically expecting to make it back into the cage sometime in the summer of 2024.
“Something like that,” Blachowicz said. “I was hoping for the first part of the new year, but we will see. First of all, I need to do this surgery and rehab, then we can start thinking about it. I need to go to the gym and do a sparring session, I want to feel my power again and I can find a new fight.”