Daniel Cormier has an excuse for his strange and controversial weight cut during Friday’s UFC 210 weigh-ins, but Jon Jones isn’t buying it.
The current light heavyweight champion clocked in at 206.2 pounds during his first weigh-in before dropping 1.2 pounds in a matter of minutes to make weight. Cormier was holding a towel during his second weigh-in, leading some to speculate he leaned on it to get his weight down, but the champ told reporters afterward that wasn’t the case.
“I didn’t want you guys to see my junk,” Cormier said.
He later told Fox Sports 1 that the reason for the fluctuation in weight was a scale issue.
“It was crazy, I weighed in upstairs and I was like ‘Man I’m okay, I’m going to do this,'” Cormier said, as transcribed by MMAFighting.com. “It was harder than normally, but we figured we had it done, the scale was weighing different.”
However, Jones, the suspended former light heavyweight champion, believes Cormier’s reasoning is hogwash and that he used the towel to manipulate his weight.
“That was absolutely nuts,” Jones told reporters during his media availability Friday night. “I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. I watched the guy. If you focus on his hands, you can see him looking down and like, balancing out his weight just right to make 205. What a clever trick. Very dishonest of him.”
Jones is native to upstate New York and is in Buffalo for UFC 210, and there is a strong chance he will square off against the winner of Cormier’s title fight against Anthony Johnson whenever he returns from suspension in July. Until then, Jones isn’t wasting any time dishing some trash talk to Cormier, who he defeated at UFC 182 to retain his light heavyweight belt before a series of legal and doping controversies resulted in him being stripped of his title.
“The crazy thing is that it was allowed to happen,” Jones said. “I would imagine there has to be some type of commission or something to go back and see this blatant foul play and address it. Nobody addressed it. They just basically got away with one of the dirtiest things I’ve seen in sports.”
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
