Earlier this week, former UFC flyweight title challenger was forced to jump from his hotel room in order to escape from a California wildfire.
Recently speaking about the incident, “The Messenger” revealed that he originally went back to sleep after thinking nothing serious was taking place:
“I was like, ‘I don’t know why they’re doing that. I thought it was just a California thing,’” Cejudo told Yahoo! Sports’ Kevin Iole. “I didn’t think anything of it. I’m an Arizona boy.”
“I looked out the window and everything was OK. I was just thinking that someone had hit the alarm but it didn’t seem like there was anything wrong. I just went back to sleep.”
Obviously, the situation did indeed turn into something serious, and once he realized, Cejudo was forced to react immediately. Upon landing after jumping, the former Olympian suffered a burn on his foot, although he escaped relatively unscathed aside from that:
“I saw houses on fire and I looked to my left and half of the hotel I was staying at, my floor, was on fire,” Cejudo recalled. “It was scary. And at that time, the only thing I could do was to grab my slacks. I grabbed my slacks I wore the night before, but I couldn’t see anything to do anything else. I put my slacks on, I opened the window and I jumped off. I leaped off the second story of the hotel.”
“As I jumped off, I landed on a branch that was on fire. Honestly, there was fire everywhere. The fire burned the top of my right foot. I was OK, but I had to put the fire out that was on my right foot. And as I was walking toward the front of the hotel, where the lobby was, it was all going. I saw the hotel on fire, cars on fire, houses around it. It was terrible.”
After the news was announced, much of the attention focused on the fact that Cejudo lost his Olympic gold medal in the fire, but he claims that the medal is ‘just an object’:
“You know, the medal just was an object, just a medal and that’s it,” Cejudo said. “What really meant something was the blood, the sweat, the tears that went into getting that medal. I’ll always have the memories of that with me.”
“I’m not too worried about that,” he added. “This was a tragedy, just like that terrible thing that happened in Vegas. It’s awful. Losing a medal, man, I am fortunate to be here talking to you and being alive. That’s the important thing.”
“I’m just happy to be alive.”
Cejudo is currently scheduled to take on the surging Sergio Pettis at UFC 218 on Dec. 2, 2017 in Detroit, Michigan.
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A number of athletes fled the wildfires in Northern California over the weekend, and one of those athletes was UFC flyweight contender and Olympic gold medalist