Picture Credit: Twitter
UFC Lightweight Champion Charles Oliveira will be stripped off the belt as he surprisingly missed weight for his UFC 274 main event fight against Justin Gaethje. Oliveria weighed 155.5 pounds which is half-pound over the limit for a lightweight title fight.
Hence, now the Brazilian will have to vacate the belt and the scheduled championship bout will only be valid for Justin Gaethje. If Oliveira goes on to win the game, he will be the number one contender for the title. The UFC made a statement addressing the issue and said, “Charles Oliveira missed weight for his UFC 274 main event bout against Justin Gaethje on Friday afternoon in Phoenix, weighing in at 155.5 pounds.”
“Due to the weight miss, Oliveira will forfeit a percentage of his purse. As of this moment, Charles Oliveira remains the UFC Lightweight Champion, but upon the start of the Main Event Headliner tomorrow night he will vacate the 155-pound title. The fight will proceed as scheduled, but the championship will only be on the line for Gaethje. If Oliveira wins, he will be the number one contender for the vacant Lightweight Championship and will fight the next challenger for the undisputed title belt at a time and place to be determined.”
“I wake up the following day and it’s a pound over,” Oliveira
Later Oliveira also released a statement where he talked about how he had made weight on Thursday and hadn’t consumed anything before the weigh-ins. The statement said, “The story is that I went up to my room. I made weight on the UFC scale on Thursday night. I go up to my room (and) didn’t consume anything. No water, no food, no anything. I swear to God. In the name of my daughter, the most sacred thing in my life. I went to bed. I wake up the following day and it’s a pound over.”
“I’m looking at it. I’m one kilogram over, actually. I’m one over and I don’t understand what happened. I can’t understand. We work. We’re professionals. I didn’t do anything wrong. To me, it just didn’t make sense. Other fighters started talking about it as well. They started talking about those 200 grams, 300 grams. It was exactly the difference of the scale with the UFC. This is what we’re going back to. The champion has a name. His name is Charles Oliveira, ” the statement continued.