Just a few days out from the much-hyped UFC Freedom 250 event on the lawn of the White House the promotion’s biggest fears regarding potential bad weather could yet become a reality.

Since early in the process of putting together this one-of-a-kind outdoor event UFC CEO Dana White has admitted to having concerns about bad weather throwing a spanner in the works, though he has insisted that aside from a thunderstorm the show will go on regardless.

However, its no longer just idle talk as at the time of writing early on Thursday morning several forecasts are actually predicting that rain. thunderstorms and humid temperatures are indeed a possibility for Sunday PM in Washington D.C.

A lot of the weight of responsibility regarding what to do in a situation like this falls on the shoulders of the UFC’s Chief Content Officer Craig Borsari, who takes the role of lead producer on Sunday night, and he’s been speaking about their contingency plans in a worst-case scenario.

“We are now at a period of time where weather can get fairly predictable,” Borsari said at yesterday’s UFC media day. “When you’re 7-10 days out, you get a general sense of what’s ahead of you. Now, starting with Friday, we have a pretty good idea of what we might be facing. So I’m not checking weather apps, I’m getting reports from our meteorologist, who’s on site, and now he’s at a point where he’s giving us hourly updates of what the weather looks like.”

Current reports suggest that the temperature by the time the event gets underway at 8pm ET could still be above 80 degrees fahrenheit, but while that will clearly be a real challenge for fighters, Borsari has revealed that they are doing their best to tackle the potential concern of the Octagon canvas getting overly hot.

“We have a custom cover for the canvas, so that’s going to protect us from any increased heat,” Borsari said. “Part of the reason why we picked an 8 p.m. start time was so that we could get some of the intense direct sunlight off of the canvas, so we feel confident that the heat of the canvas, we have plans to mitigate that. Moisture, precipitation, wind, those are other things that we’re planning for, but in terms of the actual canvas being warm, yeah, when you’re out in the sun, particularly this time of year, it gets hot very quickly.

“We’ll keep it covered, we’ll keep it cool, there also is a canopy overhead, which you’ve probably seen on this claw structure, but there’s a 100-foot canopy or tarp over that that also provides a lot of shade and reduces the heat quite a bit.”

The heat is one thing, but really it’s other things like heavy rain and lightning that Borsari acknowledges they can’t fully legislate against, though they believe they can withstand a certain amount of bad weather.

“If we have light to moderate rain with no lightning, we’re going to try to push forward,” Borsari said. “That canopy will help, it’s more floor seating maybe a couple of rows up, the bleacher packs, there are people that will get wet, and to be honest, it’s so high up that if we’ve got a bit of a breeze, the rain will start to creep inside that 100-foot diameter.”

What happens if the worst comes to the worst though?

“So we have a few options,” Borsari said. “One is to stay on air and we do have contingency planning where we can remain and continue to broadcast from a location close by the South Lawn, and if we feel like a weather pattern’s coming in that will pass through and we can resume, we will. So we would not leave the broadcast, we would just fill and report from site.

“It’s a bit of an evaluation, so when we’re going through that we’ll be talking regularly to a meteorologist, who is right now on site giving us updates. We’ll figure out what does this window look like? Do we have the ability to resume or what is the extent of the weather front that’s coming through.”

Meanwhile, despite having stated his dislike for outdoor events many times over the years, Dana White continues to be adopting a defiant policy of ‘the show must go on’, on Sunday night, regardless of what happens.

“I mean, if you read the internet the f***ing whole show is getting shut down on Sunday,” White told reporters on Tuesday. “But I don’t care if it snows, rains, whatever, we’re going, and even lightning. You guys all played sports when you were growing up. Whenever there was lightning, you’d sit the lightning out, and then when it was over, you played. That’s what we’ll do. And if there would be lightning, we’d know it days before, and then we would work around it.”