UFC heavyweight title challenger Fabricio Werdum suffered a life-threatening carbon monoxide incident in the first day of his training camp in Mexico recently as he began preparations to take on Cain Velasquez at UFC 180 on November 15th.
Werdum and 12 others including famed coach Rafael Cordeiro, the heavyweight’s brother Felipe Werdum and former UFC fighter Renato “Babalu” Sobral had arrived in Nevado de Toluca, Mexico to find that their rented home had no power, resulting in a gas generator being used instead.
“We were training inside the house, had dinner and went to bed,” Werdum recalls in n interview with MMAfighting.com. “They didn’t tell us to turn that thing off before sleeping. I woke us in the middle of the night with a huge headache, nausea, and couldn’t get out of bed. Everyone was dizzy. My brother got out of his bed and managed to turn that thing off. We almost died from poisoning.
“We went to the hospital, everybody throwing up and with diarrhea. The doctor said that we would have died in two hours if nobody had turned that thing off.”
Thankfully Werdum and his teammates are ok and are able to laugh about it now, but they really did have a brush with a death here and it could easily have turned into an unspeakable tragedy.
Instead, life goes on and Werdum will have the opportunity of a lifetime to fight of the heavyweight title in just a few weeks time.
