Colby Covington has pinned the blame on a broken foot for his poor performance in a one-sided title fight against Leon Edwards at UFC 296 late last year.
“The result wasn’t what I wanted, it wasn’t my night,” Covington told Submission Radio. “I broke my foot right away, and I couldn’t plant or explode off it to use the wrestling and pressure I planned to use. I didn’t want to disclose this information until I had the x-rays.”
“I knew straight away it was bad. It was the first kick I threw, it landed right on his elbow. He was in Orthodox, so I kind of got a little overzealous, and I wanted to rip a high kick towards his Orthodox side, cause I didn’t know if he would be defensively sound like he is from Southpaw … Haters will still find a way to hate on me for fighting 25 minutes on one leg while landing over a hundred strikes more than Leon!”
The 35-year-old Covington did have x-rays to back up his broken foot claim, although his assertion that he’d landed over a hundred more strikes than Edwards isn’t factual, with official stats showing that he landed 44 more strikes than the champ overall, although perhaps more importantly Edwards was documented as having landed 13 more significant strikes than him.
Covington did however confess that he struggled to maintain his composure after suffering the broken foot so early in the fight.
“It was a panic-type mode,” Covington recalled. “You’re like, ‘Oh, f*ck. I’m compromised.’ You know your foot’s hurt, you know? I could feel it throbbing and the fire really started to hit my foot and start to feel that excruciating type of pain.”
“I remember going back to the end of the first round and I always sit down, I want to hear my coaches and just breathe. That first round, I’m just chilling, I’m doing what I love for a living. Sit and kind of breathe and relax until the next round. I didn’t even sit because it was throbbing so bad I’m like, ‘F***, if I sit down right now, it might be so much pain I might not be able to stand back up off the stool.’ There was just a lot of panic at the end of the first round. Like f***. I couldn’t listen to my coaches, everything just felt like it was zoning out because all I could care about was my foot and not being able to put any weight on it.”
Covington is now looking ahead to future fights and has mentioned the likes of Ian Garry, Gilbert Burns and Stephen Thompson as potential opponents.
“If he can get through the bus boy [Geoff Neal], and UFC deems that to be the biggest and best business the UFC can do in the welterweight division, then let’s do it,” Covington said of Ian Garry. “UFC knows what Colby ‘Chaos’ Covington is about.
“There’s a lot of options. We got Gilbert [Burns] coming up. That fat lesbian just like Conor [McGregor] said. He’s coming up in March. If he beats that other kid that he’s fighting, whatever the scrub’s name is [Jack Della Maddalena] then that’s a possibility. I think [Stephen] ‘Wonderboy’ [Thompson] makes the most sense. The ultimate nice guy vs. the ultimate bad guy. He’s had a lot of things to say, that fight makes the most sense.”
