UFC strawweight fighter Paige VanZant has been ruled out of making a return to action at UFC 200 in July due to her continued success on the ‘Dancing With The Stars’ show on ABC.
PVZ has been dancing up a storm on the show so far, tieing for first place in the latest episode with a perfect 30/30 score from the judges. With only a few weeks remaining she could make it all the way to the finals – a two hour special on May 24th for the final four contestants.
As such, her manager has revealed that they’ve decided that returning to fighting at UFC 200 on July 9th is just a little too close for comfort, and so they’ve decided to rule her out of competing at that historic show.
“After thinking about it, the show is taking up a lot of her time,” PVZ’s manager Mike Roberts said. “She wants to have time to improve and get better, so we decided to postpone her return to about late-August.”
The news will be something of a disappointment for the UFC, who were believed to have been looking to use PVZ’s new-found mainstream recognition to help drive additional eyeballs to the already star-studded UFC 200 event.
From VanZant’s perspective it makes a lot of sense though. After all, she actually lost her last UFC fight to Rose Namajunas back in December, so rushing back into action and potentially suffering the same fate would be something of a disaster.
While there’s no doubt that she has a great deal of potential, the fight with Namajunas clearly highlighted that VanZant needs more time in the gym to mature and develop. ‘DTWS’ was too good of an opportunity to pass up, but it has meant that she’s missed out on that, so a quick comeback would have been a risky move.
