Aldo Out With Injury, Poirier To Face Grispi At UFC 125

Added on Nov 24, 2010 by John Petit in

UFC & MMA

The News came out early yesterday that Jose Aldo would not fight on this years New Year card for UFC 125 in Vegas. We heard there was a chance he may still fight, but the first featherweight UFC Champion will not be defending his title at 125 . Aldo was just in the news, as video surfaced of him receiving his official UFC featherweight belt.

His trainer said he had a horrible time breaking the news to Aldo, but felt it was the best thing to do for his fighters safety. Andre Pederneiras, head of Nova Uniao, told Sherdog “It was such a really tough task for me to convince him not to fight. He wanted to fight anyway. He was really excited to make his UFC debut, but I told him [fighting] in such a crisis state, he may have really serious problems. He argued that he wanted to fight anyway, that people would think he was chickening out, but I insisted and convinced him.”

According to Pederneiras he has been having an issue with this in training for the last two fights. He continued “He’s felt this pain in his right arm for a long time, but you know how the tough guys behave. He just took an anti-inflammatory and kept training. But during training for his last two fights, it started to be more painful and, even with the medicine, he was complaining. Before we traveled for UFC 123, we went to a doctor and he said that he believed Aldo had some problem in his cervical spine, but he could only confirm after seeing the images from the exam.”

When they returned home from picking up Aldo’s brand new UFC Title Belt the bad news came from the doctors. “When we returned, the doctor called me to say that Aldo had a reduction of the space between some vertebrae, and between C5 and C6, it was touching the medulla, which was causing the problem in the arm,” Pederneiras explained. “The doctor said that if Aldo doesn’t stop immediately for a month of physiotherapy [to realign the vertebrae], he could have more serious problems that prevent him from training for a longer time and require him to have surgery.”

This was a huge fight for Aldo. Its a Co-Main event defending the first Featherweight title in the history of the UFC, and It’s the biggest fight of his young career. Many agree he is a natural at what he does, but he is still growing as a fighter. Pederneiras confessed that it was awful breaking the news to Aldo, “It was really hard. It was like hell for me. He was really disappointed and even cried after we made the decision. But finally, now we made the right decision. He’ll start physiotherapy and I think, in three months, he can finally make his Octagon debut.”

Aldo will be replaced by Dustin Poirier who will fight Josh Grispi at UFC 125 in Las Vegas. This is the second time the co-main event for 125 was scrapped, as Shane Carwin was forced to pull out of his fight with Roy Nelson.