A re-booked flyweight fight between Brandon Royval and Manel Kape is the first fight to be booked for the upcoming UFC 317 event on June 28th during the annual International Fight Week festivities in Las Vegas.
This fight had originally been scheduled to headline UFC Fight Night 253 on March 1st, but had to be cancelled in early February after Royval withdrew due to having suffered two concussions in the space of a couple of months while training.
In Royval’s absence, the 31-year-old Kape went on to Asu Almabayev at the event instead and defeated him by TKO in the third round. That left Kape with four wins in his last five fights and took him to the No.6 spot on the flyweight rankings.
As for the 32-year-old Royval, he has also gone 4-1 in his last five Octagon appearances, with his only loss during that time being in a title fight with Alexandre Pantoja in late 2023 that he lost by unanimous decision.
Truth be told It’s somewhat surprising to see Royval accepting a fight just two months after he revealed he was still suffering from concussion-related symptoms.
“I was training hard for this fight, and being a little reckless and being kind of in the zone for camp, I got another concussion,” Royval had said on his YouTube channel back on February 10th. “This one was severely worse. It’s been over a week at this point, and I’m still dealing with the repercussions of it and the symptoms of a bad concussion.”
Within the last 24 hours Royval has said in a new interview on the Inside Fighting youtube channel that those symptoms included brain fog, struggling to formulate sentences, having constant headaches and having issues tracking his eye movement.
Worse still, he went on to say that while those symptoms gradually improved after working with the UFC PI on things like improving his diet to reduce inflammation, he was still suffering to a lesser extent from some symptoms on March 1st when he had originally been scheduled to fight Kape.
So Royval already booking a fight feels hasty, especially if you consider that when Alexander Volkanovski suffered two (admittedly brutal) KO losses in a row he accepted that he needed to take time off and will have taken 14 months out by the time he returns to action next weekend.
Royval is currently the No.1 contender in the flyweight division though, and so a win over Kape on one of the most high-profile events of the year could propel him into another title shot and may have proven to be too good an opportunity to pass up on, but it feels like a big gamble.
