Georges St-Pierre has finally spoken out about the real reason that he announced a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t be ready to make his comeback until November, which resulted in his middleweight title fight with Michael Bisping being scrapped.
It turns out that the former welterweight champion has been dealing with an eye injury that would prevent him competing this summer.
“Trust me, I’m not the kind of guy who thinks, ‘Hey, I’m going to make everybody wait for me. I don’t want to fight during the summer, I want to take my time …,’” GSP stated at the C2 Montreal Conference yesterday. “That’s not the reason. If it were up to me, I would come back. The reason is I had a problem with my eye. I had an injury.”
“My vision has not been back yet. It will be back. It’s something very minor. The doctor insisted for me that I don’t spar until September.”
Interestingly, St-Pierre went on to note that the UFC have known about this since before they announced the fight with Bisping in the first place.
“The UFC was aware of it. They knew I couldn’t fight during the summer, but they still insisted on doing that press conference with Michael Bisping. And when it happened, we were not very excited about the idea, but we wanted that fight, so we decided to do it, but then it turned into a negative thing because it took so long.
“But UFC knew. Everyone knew. The people concerned knew that that was the case, but they still tried to put pressure on me to fight in July. That’s the reason why I’m coming out public today about the reason why I’m not fighting this summer.”
Along with GSP, it’s also emerged that Bisping is also suffering from a knee injury that would have stopped him from fighting in July too, and though the UFC have now booked an interim 185lb title bout between Yoel Romero and Robert Whittaker instead, it seems that the Canadian superstar is still holding out hope that he can fight ‘The Count’ for the title when he returns.
“I always said that if I was coming back to fight, it needed to be a fight that excites me. I wanted to fight Michael Bisping because I wanted to fight someone that could elevate me. Michael Bisping is the champion now, and I think that he could elevate me as much as I could elevate him. I’m taking a huge risk coming back. I’m putting my legacy on the line.”
