Former UFC champion says she still feels the impact COVID-19 had on her lungs.
Miesha Tate returned to the Octagon in July, cancelling a retirement she announced back in 2016. In her return fight Tate, who looked to be in the best shape of her life, defeated Marion Reneau by third round TKO.
After that win Tate was booked to fight Ketlen Vieira in the main event UFC Vegas 40 on October 16. However, that fight was called off after Tate tested positive for COVID-19.
Tate recently spoke to Combat Culture about her experience with the deadly virus (see above).
“It’s still clearing out of my lungs just a little bit, like when I wake up in the morning,” she said (ht MMA Mania). “You can hear it a little bit, probably, in my sinuses still. I still have a little bit of a cough, but it’s getting better every day. I had a really tough strength and conditioning workout today and I feel like I crushed it, so the limitations are getting much less. I think it’s just a matter of continuing to work through it and progress. Hopefully, this will get rescheduled before too long. Essentially, it cost me two weeks of camp. I was pretty sick. Nothing alarming. A little bit of a fever. I had a pretty severe cough. I had sinus congestion. I wasn’t sleeping well at night. Taste and smell got weird, it was kind of muted. But the next week my kids were sick. So I couldn’t get really even get to the gym to train, I couldn’t hire a sitter, I couldn’t have anybody come here, I couldn’t take them out, I couldn’t take them with me.
“So it’s like two weeks, and even that week was pretty rough as far as trying to get my body back into the swing of things. That definitely was nowhere near 100 percent. I tried really hard to talk myself into keeping the fight on Oct. 16, but the reality was I just wasn’t going to be on par to be at that 100 percent mark and I have to be. That was a choice to delay.”
With Tate on the mend her fight with Vieira has been moved to UFC Vegas 43 on November 20 (per MMA Fighting).
That fight is currently scheduled to headline that card. Other fights announced for that event include Joanne Calderwood vs. Alexa Grasso, Michael Chiesa vs. Sean Brady and Cheyanne Buys vs. Loma Lookboonmee.
A former Strikeforce and UFC bantamweight champion, Tate is a pioneer of the sport who has been competing since the days of HOOKnSHOOT in 2007.
After joining the UFC in 2012 she defeated Julie Kedzie before back-to-back losses to Cat Zingano and Ronda Rousey. She would then go on a five-fight winning streak with wins over Liz Carmouche, Rin Nakai, Sara McMann, Jessica Eye and Holly Holm.
The win over Holm claimed the UFC bantamweight title. At UFC 200 in 2016 she lost that belt to reigning UFC double-champion Amanda Nunes. She then took a loss to Raquel Pennington before announcing her short-lived retirement.