UFC light-heavyweight Steve Cantwell was forced to withdraw from this Saturday’s UFC 120 event due to a knee injury suffered at the last minute while training. It is most certainly a disappointing situation for Cantwell as he hoped to get back into the octagon after a year off.
The fighter spoke to MMAFighting.com about the injury and the circumstances surrounding it recently.
“Wednesday we were training. It was my last medium day training, just trying to cut weight, loosen up a little bit. I was just having a really, really great training session. Literally, the last five minutes I was rolling — we did three rounds on pads and two rolling — literally the last minute, I rolled, hit a move, my foot got caught and torqued my knee and popped my lateral collateral ligament. I couldn’t walk. I tried to play it off because there were all kinds of people in the room, like, ‘Ah, I got a cramp. I’m done training,’ kind of thing.”
“To tell you the truth, I really didn’t have much to think about it. I was planning on fighting up until this morning, even though I couldn’t walk. I was still going to try to duke it out, but then the UFC doctor advised me not to and the UFC didn’t want to me to, so, really, I’ve only had a couple of hours to think about it, and it just kind of sucks, man. Back to the drawing board, I guess.”
Cantwell had been scheduled to face Stanislav Nedkov on the preliminary card of UFC 120, now neither fighter will make an appearance at the event.