Midnight Mania! Oops! Incorrect Calibration Falsely Causes Two Scale Fails

Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

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Welcome to Midnight Mania!

Man, this is a seriously stressful situation for any fighter! Tracy Cortez was looking to make her UFC debut opposite Vanessa Melo early today at 135 lbs., but both women were ruled overweight by about half a pound. That’s a costly few ounces, one that would have directly affected both their purses and professional reputations.

Instead, the Brazilian athletic commission CABMMA admitted the scales were incorrectly calibrated, resulting in the misses. Here’s the full explanations from CABMMA executive director Cristiano Sampaio courtesy of MMAJunkie:

“CABMMA reviewed the incident between the athletes Vanessa Melo and Tracy Cortez. Both were checked by the commission with 20 minutes left to the ending time of the official weigh-ins. Scale used by the commission was 0.7lbs above the official scale, which indicated that the athletes could not lose any more weight in the remaining time. Athletes were then withdrawn from the cutting process.

“CABMMA physicians evaluated the athletes and considered both in well conditions but were not given the extra hour, which per guideline is only for main event and title bouts.

“Considering the fact that (i) fighters were checked in a scale which was not calibrated as the official one; (ii) commission was misguided by the wrong weight and conducted their guideline on an incorrect data; and (iii) since the difference between the scales was off by 0.7lbs and both athletes made the exact weight on the official scale, CABMMA will consider their official weight as 136lbs.

“In that sense, the athletes will not suffer any fine (or) penalty, and have their records maintained. To CABMMA’s understanding, weight classes are designed for safety and fairness, not a strict rule that prevents these goals.”

Insomnia

Apologies to those who hate my self-promotion and fight talk — this is going to be a rough night for you (even though if you skip just a couple images, I’ll have the exact same amount of non-me content as usual). Just about 24 hours after this posts, I’ll be competing in my third professional fight after a long layoff . This morning, I cut to Flyweight for the first time since 2015, and it went really well!

All is set for tomorrow. Win, lose, or draw, I’ll have a full results post written up early next week just like all the other fights to really dig into the details. And, for what it’s worth, glory is not a huge motivating factor for me — but I do love a good quote!

Fourth fight of the night! With some luck, there will be a live stream on the MMAmania Facebook page.

Last but not least, a huge thanks to everyone who chipped in towards the banner raffle. I have the physical ready to roll tomorrow night and will include a pic, but here’s the final image result!

THE LEGENDARY RUSSIAN SLAPPER RETURNS!

A quick comparison. Exhibit A is an absolutely insane cat person:

Meanwhile, One Championship’s Jihin Radzuan is clearly an awesome cat person.

Ryan Bader is the undisputed prank master.

Mike Bisping reflects on a tough time — you just cannot question the man’s heart.

SACRAMENTO REPRESENT!

Slips, rips, and KO clips

Do I occasionally get annoyed with tired, unskilled Heavyweights? Sure. But, it’s always good to keep in perspective just how small the amount of space needed is for one of those big men to land a nasty knockout.

Throwing spinning kicks while not great at them is probably not the best idea.

Topuria loaded that right hand ALL THE WAY up.

One look back at this incredible knockout before tomorrow night’s main event in Sao Paulo.

Random Land

Nature arranged this one pretty perfectly.

Midnight Music: My walkout song for tomorrow night, which seemed appropriate given the 16 month layoff and relevant trials to getting back in the cage. Plus … it’s a bop.

Sleep well Maniacs! More martial arts madness is always on the way.