Daniel Cormier is pulling back the curtain on one of his most infamous moments.
Ahead of his title fight against Anthony Johnson at UFC 210 in April 2017, Cormier weighed in over the limit on his first attempt. Moments later, Cormier returned to the scale and stood behind a towel when an announcement was made that he hit the championship mark at 205 pounds — although Cormier’s hands were clearly on the towel.
Eventually, as he was being inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2022, Cormier admitted that he used the towel for assistance. But in a recent interview, Cormier dove deeper into what happened that week, and then pointed the finger at a longtime teammate, and fellow former UFC champion.
“I tried to quit,” Cormier told Aljamain Sterling about the weight cut. “I was hurting bad. … I was like, ‘Yo, this is a bad one.’ And guess whose fault it was? Luke Rockhold’s.”
Cormier would go on to successfully defend his light heavyweight title for the second time with a second-round rear-naked choke submission over Johnson.
The former two-division champion says Rockhold had a prior engagement that led him to pushing Cormier to stop his weight cut at a time where he shouldn’t have, and chose not to listen to the others around him.
“I’m at Buffalo University running, but I was in front of this shed, you know those barn doors where you roll them up? Those shed doors? It’s like a metal door, and it was so cold. So I had this draft coming in as I’m on the treadmill. Bro, I’m losing the weight and it’s coming [off], but it’s harder. So I’m like five over, and I tell Luke Rockhold, ‘I should probably get two more pounds off before I leave.’
“Luke had a girl lined up. He wants nothing more than to leave the gym, so he convinces me – [and] it’s not hard because I’m feeling like I’m feeling. I want someone to tell me to go. And everybody’s like, ‘No, you got to lose more weight,’ and I look at Luke and he’s like, ‘He’s fine, let him go.’ I’m like, ‘Yo, we should listen to Luke.’ And so I listen to that moron, and I left. That’s what happened, bro.
“I hope whoever it was was worth it to Luke, because then I had to have the most embarrassing moment of my career.”
Cormier eventually made the move up to heavyweight, where he captured his second divisional title with a knockout win against Stipe Miocic.
Although Rockhold is to blame in Cormier’s eyes for that memorable moment going the way that it, “DC” says that the commission members in charge of that day’s weigh-ins made things even easier for him to get away with it.
“It went down low, to like 203,” Cormier explained. “But you know what the problem was? They had the scale on the floor. That’s why now it’s like right in front of you, so the commission can look down and still see what you’re doing. But, bro, the scale was on the floor… it was this lady and this guy – it’s so funny – so for some reason this lady’s on the floor. She’s like on her knees looking at the scale, probably because it went to 203.
“And then the guy looks and he’s on the floor, too. So the two commissioners are on the floor. I look down at them and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ They were on the floor. Bro, it was a nightmare. My strength coach was the one holding the towel. How does your coach get to hold the towel? It was a mess, bro.”
Source link
