Featherweight champion Jose Aldo will today find out for sure whether he has a fractured rib, and if it is confirmed it will almost certainly result in his much-hyped UFC 189 fight with Conor McGregor on July 11th being cancelled.
Aldo is believed to have suffered the rib injury during a training session yesterday after taking a kick to the mid-section from up and coming lightweight fighter Alicides Nunes.
Afterwards Aldo was reported to be in “deep pain” and while everyone is hoping for a miracle the reality is that if the scan comes back today confirming that it is broken, he will be out of action for several months.
“If the fracture is really confirmed, Aldo will have to stop training, do nothing for three or four weeks until it’s fixed, and then he would be able to do any exercise without forcing his rib,” Aldo’s coach Andre Pederneiras told Combate. “And then he would need a normal time to do a training camp: three months. I believe this fight wouldn’t happen before October.”
Pederneiras also revealed that Aldo is devasted by the prospect of missing out on what many people, including Dana White, had declared as the ‘Fight Of The Year’, which us undoubtedly the Brazilian ace’s highest profile bout to date and would also have been his biggest payday by a country mile.
“He cried,” Pederneiras said. “He wants this fight bad, everybody invested a lot in this. I was with him the whole afternoon. He’s heartbroken. He wants to fight anyway. Now we have to wait for the exam results.”
