At UFC 274 we saw history made on the scales when the then-lightweight champion, Charles Oliveira, missed weight and was stripped of his title. But with anything involving weight cutting a controversy arose when several fighters and even Dana White announced there was an issue with the calibration of the backstage scale.
Former interim champion Dustin Poirier has an idea for helping to make sure that issue doesn’t happen again.
“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 controversy was made even wilder due to Oliveira tweeting he had already made weight, something many fighters and fans believe due to his condition on the scale.
“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.”
Dustin Poirier wants weigh-in changes following Charles Oliveira controversy
