Colby Covington is breaking his silence. It has been a while since we heard from the outspoken welterweight contender, who suffered a broken jaw in his most recent outing which was a loss to 170-pound champion Kamaru Usman.
While Covington is finally speaking out about his loss, he is claiming he was not 100 percent going into the fight.
If Covington is to be believed, food poisoning nearly forced Covington out of the bout and his body did not feel right. That led to Covington abandoning his wrestling because he felt weakness in his body.
“I’m not making excuses,” Covington said, as transcribed by BJPenn.com. “I haven’t really told anybody, but the UFC was preparing meals for me all fight week, and I ended up getting really sick of one of their meals. I think they didn’t cook the chicken very good, and I got food poisoning two nights before the fight. I puked like 30 times, literally like 30 times. I told my manager Dan Lambert ‘I’m going to have to pull out of the fight, man.’ He’s like ‘no, you can’t pull out man, you’re the main event. You can’t do this to the UFC, you just need to go through with it.’
“I ended up going through with it, but I didn’t feel my best. That kind of played into the decision not to wrestle [in the fight] because I didn’t feel strong. It’s like I was holding back a little bit because I knew I was puking, my liver and intestines were all messed up and I wasn’t at full strength. So what I’m trying to say is I was on my worst day and ‘Marty Fake Newsman’ was on his best day and I still beat him. So you can imagine what’s going to happen in the rematch when I’m at my best and he’s at whatever level he’s at.”
Of course, when Covington will get his rematch remains to be seen.
UFC president Dana White most recently said that Usman’s next title defense will come at International Fight Week in July against Baddest Motherf*cker titleholder Jorge Masvidal.
