Some UK fighters were less than thrilled with the fact that UFC 304 in Manchester, England last weekend took place in the early hours of the morning to ensure it aired live at it’s regular time-slot in the U.S. and Arnold Allen believes that’s the reason he crashed his car just a week out from his fight on the PPV main card.
Allen’s fight with Giga Chikadze was scheduled to be the main card opener, meaning he’d be making his walk to the Octagon around 3.10am in the UK, so Allen purposefully switched up his training schedule leading into the event to try to adjust to that, which led to him doing a workouts late in the evening.
“After my last sparring, I was driving home because the time was f*cked up,” Allen said on his YouTube channel. “I underslept that day because my team — there was an event that night and people were fighting, so my team had to train earlier, so I came into sparring earlier. I was driving home half asleep and I spun my car out, and crashed it into a barrier somewhere. That was on the way home after my last sparring. I was so tired, and it was pretty scary, I was facing the wrong way on the motorway.
“You don’t ever want to see the cars coming at you. I’ve been driving since I was 19, that was my first crash. Definitely not ideal the Saturday before your fight, a few days out.”
Luckily Allen emerged unscathed from the incident and would go on to beat Chikadze by unanimous decision at UFC 304, but it’s an experience the No.5 ranked featherweight is eager not to repeat.
“It was fine,” Allen said. “No one got hurt, didn’t hit anyone else, damaged my car a bit, and it was 100 percent because I was half asleep, stupid. I was rushing home trying to get back to bed. So hopefully I never do that again because that sucked, and I damaged my car, which I’m pissed off about.”
Allen wasn’t the only UK fighter to admit to having suffered as a result of the late start time for UFC 304 as though he also emerged victorious in impressively swift fashion on the night, co-main event interim-heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall said he was feeling sleep-deprived heading into the bout.
“You know what, that was probably the longest day of my life,” Aspinall told Megan Oliva after the fight. “Honestly, I slightly changed my sleep schedule. So I was going to bed at like 4, sleeping as long as I can ’til like 10 or 11, something like that. But then last night I decided ‘I’m just going to go to bed at normal time, wake up at like 7 or 8 and then have an afternoon nap. And let me tell you, there was no chance of me sleeping, I was so nervous.”
Things still worked out for Aspinall, but not so for Leon Edwards, who lost his welterweight title to Belal Muhammad in the main event and afterwards suggested that the late-night start had effected his performance.
“My body just felt tired, you know, from round one,” Edwards told Daniel Cormier in the Octagon immediately after the fight. “All week I’ve been feeling tired from the timing, but congrats to Belal, he got the job done.”
