I was preparing to do a giant statistical breakdown on the different injuries that have affected or cancelled fights in the UFC over the past three years. I was expecting that the main culprits would be back injuries and hand injuries, but what I ended up finding was a giant statistical black hole.
Within minutes of looking over injury data, I noticed a disturbing trend. Every second injury announcement, there would be the word, the one I dreaded to see, undisclosed.
Webster’s defines the word undisclosed as: not made known
I define the word undisclosed as: a pain in the butt; secrecy of information
From January 2013 – November 2014, there have been 203 injuries that have altered previously announced fights. Surprisingly, the UFC announced 128 of these injuries as undisclosed. This means that 63% of the injuries in the past two years were given no explanation when announced.
It may be the inner skeptic in me, but I do believe that the UFC not revealing these fighter’s injuries is not only a part of the injury problem, but is fuelling more and more fighters to pull out of fights.
Training Camps Are To Blame
As shown in one of my previous injury articles, fight camps play a big role in fighter injuries. It is where most, if not all, fight cancelling injuries occur, and some camps have high injury rates of over 14.5% (Roufusport and Nova Uniao), where others have low injury rates of just under 3.5% (Team Alpha Male).
While doing a little bit of investigating and talking to people who know the ins and outs of the sport, I wasn’t surprised when I found that the breadcrumb trail for undisclosed injuries led me right back to the training camps of the fighters.
Fight camps need to protect their fighters, so not releasing the fighters injury to both the UFC and the fans is beneficial. It allows future opponents to not know a potential weak spot, as well hides the possible cause of the injury.
Hiding the cause of the injury is very beneficial for a fight camp as it deflects blame away from them. Jon Jones and Team Jacksons received heavy criticism when it was discovered that Alistair Overeem had injured the champion. Champions are often forced to reveal their injury due to heavy media scrutiny.
Champions are unfortunately the exception though as the statistics show that the majority of fighters do not have their specific injuries announced. How could fans possibly try and grasp what is causing fighter injuries when we are given little to no details about how half of the injuries occurred?
Questioning The UFC
The big question I have in all of this is, does the UFC know what these injuries are and how they are coming about? The obvious thought would be that since the UFC is trying to prevent more injuries from happening that they would also be all over fight camps to disclose their fighter’s injury.
An even bigger question, does the UFC look into fighter injuries to see both the severity and cause of the injury, or do they take the fight camp’s word? I contacted the UFC’s press department asking these exact questions, but as of writing this article, I have not heard back from them.
It would be beneficial for the UFC to begin overlooking certain fight camps with higher than normal injury rates to see what the camps are doing wrong. It would also be beneficial to see why certain fighters are pulling out of fights, or if there are other factors that play a role in a fighter pulling out.
Of course, no fighter wants to pull out of a fight an lose a potential pay day, but in order to fix the problem of injuries, we need full disclosure on where, when and why all of these injuries are occurring, and to do that, we need the information to be disclosed.
Are fighters getting injured primarily while sparring? Are their knees and backs weakened from years of strain? Do certain exercises and routines cause minor injuries that can delay or cancel a fight? We cannot find out these answers or begin to look into the statistics of injuries without this information.
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