Dustin Poirier thinks athletic commissions need to start using digital scales instead of balance-beam versions.
Charles Oliveira (33-8 MMA, 21-8 UFC) was forced to vacate his lightweight belt after he missed the 155-pound championship mark by half-a-pound before his UFC 274 title fight against Justin Gaethje.
Oliveira missed weight on his first and second attempts. After missing weight on his first try, Oliveira was given an hour by the Arizona commission to make the championship limit, but the Brazilian weighed in at 155.5 pounds once again. Poirier thinks had the commission used a digital scale, the weigh-in results would have been more accurate.
“We need to be on digital scales so there’s no grey area,” Poirier said on “THE FIGHT with Teddy Atlas.” “You can’t have a guy there tapping a weight-balance scale and it’s kind of balancing, and he just says it’s a half pound or whatever. We need exact numbers. You get on a digital scale, it shows up on the screen, that’s your actual weight. I don’t like the fact that these guys are tapping this balance scale.”
The mystery surrounding Oliveira’s weight miss comes from the fact that he tweeted just an hour before weigh-ins that he was on weight. Oliveira was just as confused as everyone, but Poirier thinks the former champion could have pushed more to make weight.
“They weren’t carrying him out. He wasn’t stumbling around,” Poirier said. “He’s always really lean, and he’s long and tall, so he looks slim. He’s a big guy, but he didn’t look like he needed to be helped. He still had life in his body. He could have, it looked like, tried to lose more weight. It’s a championship fight.”
Oliveira, who submitted Dustin Poirier at UFC 269 to notch his first title defense, wound up submitting Gaethje in the UFC 274 headliner and will now compete for the vacant lightweight title in his next fight.
Dustin Poirier says Charles Oliveira’s UFC 274 weight miss shows ‘we need to be on digital scales’