Ronda Rousey stunned the MMA world earlier this week when she announced that she’s making a comeback to fight Gina Carano on Netflix in May, but doubts are now emerging about whether she can pass the pre-fight medicals for the blockbuster match-up.
Just two years ago the 39-year-old Rousey confessed that she’d retired from MMA back in 2016 due to the head trauma she’d suffered over the years.
“My concussion history that I had to keep secret for years, so I would be able to continue to compete and perform,” Rousey said on Instagram Live while promoting her book, ‘Our Fight’. “That’s basically why I had to retire.”
Rousey had went on to reveal that she’d had multiple concussions over the course of not only her MMA career, but also her long run in judo competition, but had tried her best to hide it.
“So much had to do with having so many concussions when I was in judo before I even got into MMA, I couldn’t talk about it at all when I was doing MMA. Because it would literally put a target on my head, and I might not have been allowed to compete any farther.
“Same thing with WWE. They have a complicated history with their performers getting concussions, and it would be a bad look on them. So I felt like I really couldn’t talk about it at all. So I feel like this [is the] long form that I would be able to adequately address it.”
In a separate interview on the Untapped podcast, Rousey went into details about some of the alarming neurological symptoms she’d suffered before hanging up her gloves a decade ago.
“I’d get hit and I’d basically lose big chunks of my vision and my depth perception and my ability to track movements quickly and make snap decisions—which is basically all the things that I need,” Rousey said on Untapped last year.
“I had to retire, because this kept happening to me more and more often and to the point where I would get a jab and I would basically go blind.”
Despite all that, Rousey has claimed that she was told she had a “pristine brain” when she underwent an MRI scan prior to joining the WWE promotion after retiring from MMA.
However, she’ll now have to prove that’s the case prior to fighting Carano on May 16th as the California State Athletic Commission has confirmed that both competitors will have to undergo tests to prove they are healthy enough to compete.
“We’re going to put [Rousey] through neurological and concussion battery testing and make sure she’s OK,” CSAC exec Andy Foster told ESPN. “We’re going to have our doctors take a look. The fighters are going to have to do a lot of medicals, both of ‘em.
“As long as these women pass their medicals and pass all their neurological batteries and do the things they need to do, there’s nothing wrong with this fight.”
