Staph infection impacted Kelvin Gastelum’s UFC Saudi Arabia weight cut

Kelvin Gastelum’s coach detailed what went improper with the burden cut for UFC on ABC 6.

Gastelum (19-9 MMA, 13-9 UFC) was scheduled to face Daniel Rodriguez in a welterweight bout this past Saturday in Riyadh, but their bout was shifted to middleweight after Gastelum struggled along with his cut down. Gastelum won the bout by unanimous decision.

Considering Gastelum has missed weight several times before, UFC CEO Dana White was removed from thrilled. Nevertheless, Gastelum’s coach, Santino DeFranco, said the previous interim title challenger was coping with quite a little bit of adversity within the weeks leading as much as the fight.

“Initially, he didn’t accept the fight with D-Rod. He never did. He woke as much as Instagram and it was on, and he was like, ‘Whoa, what’s occurring here?’ Like that was that,” DeFranco said on his YouTube channel. When he woke as much as the news, he had been in a motorbike accident like a pair days beforehand in Thailand, got all cut up and scraped up, got home, was still all cut up and scraped up, but then he got a staph infection from all the cuts and all the pieces from the motorcycle accident. So, he had staph, and it got bad.

“It was like three weeks of antibiotics. Then he’s flying out to Saudi Arabia two weeks early to acclimate to the time because he’s fought on Fight Island and that point was really rough. He got arrange with a meal prep plan and got stuff arrange and got a gym. … Their concept of healthy food for a weight cut is like healthy food for normal people maintaining a healthy diet, not that is how you chop weight. There was just stuff that wasn’t right, and he was attempting to whittle his way through, then he got one other staph infection.”

DeFranco acknowledges that it wasn’t skilled on the a part of Gastelum, who was very apologetic in his post-fight interview.

“I hate it. It’s unacceptable this happened,” DeFranco said. “The opposite thing people don’t realize is that this may need actually saved D-Rod’s profession. He had lost two in a row. If he had lost to Kelvin and there have been no issues, there’s a very good likelihood he gets cut.

“He got a brand new contract, they upped his pay, and he got 30 percent of Kelvin’s purse. He got paid, and he got a brand new contract. Look, I’m not saying any of it was right, but look, D-Rod still has a job, Kelvin still has a job. It was a very big f*ckup, and it’s not excusable. We’re where we’re, and that’s the situation.”