Aust teen dies losing weight to fight

The death of an Australian teenager while preparing for a Muay Thai bout has shone the spotlight on extreme weight cutting among amateur fighters.

Jessica Lindsay, 18, died after she was crash-dieting, including using the processing of water loading, over a week to make weight for her second official fight.

But the practice of dehydrating the body to shed weight in a short space of time is an issue that affects all combat sports, right up to the highest levels. Khabib Nurmagomedov was pulled from a UFC interim title fight earlier this year due to weight cutting issues.

In mixed martials arts, some have described drastic weight cutting as the sport’s ‘dirty secret’ due to the mental and physical torture athletes put themselves through away from the public eye.

Yet this year alone in the UFC, the world’s premier MMA organisation, there have been several examples of fights being cancelled due to fighters pushing their bodies to breaking point in order to make certain weight limits. In March, the interim lightweight title fight between Tony Ferguson and Nurmagomedov was scrapped the day before the event after the latter was hospitalised due to "weight management medical issues".

A month earlier, the UFC removed Japanese featherweight Mizuto Hirota from a September event after he stumbled off the scales at the weigh-in.

Meanwhile, in a eye-opening feature for ESPN, UFC women’s featherweight champion Cris ‘Cyborg’ Justino allowed cameras to film the painful process as she dropped 11kg in just two days.

Such drastic weight losses have become all too common in MMA.

Doping has long been seen as the sport’s most serious problem, but extreme weight cutting is not far behind.

It comes with severe health risks and, although none in the UFC, there have been two weight cutting-related deaths in MMA over the last five years.

Fighters often don plastic suits and hop in an out of saunas in the hours leading up to weighins, often while going nil by mouth, and such extreme dehydration has been linked to kidney damage.