Andrea Lee was supposed to fight Kalindra Faria at UFC 216, but then a past drug test failure caused her to be pulled from the bout by USADA.
However, before the fight with Faria was offered to her, the LFA Women’s Flyweight Champion was offered a fight with Jessica Eye, who turned it down.
“It took me a couple of hours, and then I finally decided I was gonna take it,” Lee told MMA Oddsbreaker. “But then Jessica said she didn’t want to fight anybody else on short notice, because it’d be risky, and she’d been training for Paige, and that’s who she wanted to fight. So that fell through. So then I was like, ‘OK, well, I’m not fighting.’”
Eye was originally supposed to fight Paige VanZant at the event, but PVZ was pulled from the fight due to an injury.
Lee says she was in the midst of filling out her paperwork for UFC 216 when she heard about the USADA situation.
“I was just in the process of filling out all my paperwork and turning in my fight song and everything, and then that happened,” Lee said. “I was just blown away.”
UFC 216 takes place on Saturday, October 7 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada with Tony Ferguson and Kevin Lee headlining. Fightful is providing live coverage of the event, with a post-show podcast to follow.