UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Daniel Cormier successfully defended the gold in a rematch against Anthony Johnson at UFC 210.
There was controversy surrounding the weight cut the day before the event, most notable among it being the fact that Cormier dropped a little over a pound in under two minutes time while utilizing a towel trick. The towel trick is essentially a way fighters lean on a towel while weighing in so that they can leverage their weight and then make weight for an upcoming fight.
“When I got off the scale the first time, I walked away, and they didn’t cover me,” Cormier said on The MMA Hour. “So obviously, a guy thinks that he’s losing everything that he’s worked for on the scale, and we just walk back off the scale and nobody even worried about protecting me. So I was like, you know what, I’m going to hold the towel a little bit myself to make sure that I’m covered. Now, the reality is, I didn’t even realize I was doing that until I saw pictures, honestly. I’ve got to be completely honest with you, I didn’t even realize I was doing that. I was tired. I was very discouraged and upset because of after that had just happened, so I didn’t even realize that I was doing it.”
Cormier did make weight for the fight, despite the controversy surrounding the actual weigh-in.
Throughout the whole process at the scale, there was constant communication between Cormier and Johnson’s representatives.
“Honestly, man, my team was standing with Anthony’s team in the back and they spoke to a couple of his coaches, and they said he been working out and not losing weight,” Cormier said. “They said that ‘Rumble’ had worked out for like an hour-and-a-half and lost .8 pounds, and they were thinking, ‘this dude ain’t going to make weight either.’ Then he goes in and he’s the exact amount of weight under as I was the second time I stepped on the scale. So I don’t know what was happening with that scale, but yeah, they were concerned that he wasn’t going to (make it). He said it himself. He’s like, ‘man, I was in the same situation as you,’ so obviously we both had some issues with our scales, or the commission had a scale issue. I don’t know.”
If Cormier did fail to make weight for the event, the fighter would have been stripped of the UFC Light Heavyweight Title.
