Combat sport’s weight cutting a deadly issue
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 waterloading, 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.
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 Khabib 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 Mixed Martial Arts.
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 weigh-ins, often while going nil by mouth, and such extreme dehydration has been linked to kidney damage.
Not only that, when the body is dehydrated it also decreases the production of cerebral spinal fluid, leaving an athlete vulnerable to concussion and other brain injuries.
Extreme weight cutting is often used by a fighter to gain a physical advantage in a division much lighter than their ‘walking around weight’.
It is not something that sits well with former world kickboxing champion Mike Angove, New Zealand’s leading combat sports commentator, who described the practice as ‘‘legalised cheating’’.
‘‘The pain and damage that a body must undertake to drop weight at it’s most extreme levels is an extremely damaging process,’’ Angove told Stuff.
MMA bodies around the world have introduced measures to combat the issue.
Following the death of China’s Yang Jian Bing in 2015, Asia’s One Championship revamped their weigh-in system to get fighters as close to their natural weight as possible.
The UFC introduced morning weigh-ins to limit the process of maintaining weight throughout the day while they closely monitor the weight-cutting process during fight week.
Angove is also a coach trainer at Auckland’s City Kickboxing gym where they emphasise the importance of taking a more gradual approach to weight loss.
Many UFC athletes have called for the creation of more weight classes but he says the issue is much more complex than that.
‘‘We’re not talking about people dropping a couple of kilos to go from 73kg to 71kg, we’re talking about someone who’s dropping 10 kilos, often in the space of two days,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s not about having more weight divisions, it’s actually about people fighting close to their natural weight and changing the culture of the sport so that it becomes unacceptable.
‘‘And that’s going to take a lot of legislative work around that to punish people who do break those protocols.
‘‘Unless we deal with it at a punitive level it’s not going to change.’’