(Diego Sanchez experiences a moment of Zen.)
Diego Sanchez swears making lightweight to fight Joe Stevenson at UFC 95 won’t be a problem for him, although it sounds like it won’t be terribly easy either. Sanchez was late to today’s media conference call and explained it by saying he was trying to cut a few extra pounds in the sauna. The former welterweight said he weighed 193 pounds on Christmas Eve, and is now struggling to get those lost few pounds off in order to make 155 next Saturday.
“I don’t see myself staying at lightweight forever,” Sanchez explained, saying he wanted to challenge himself and thought he’d better hurry up and do it while he was still in his twenties and could lose weight fairly easily.
“I never really cut much weight for 170. Fighting guys like Jon Fitch, who put on seventeen, eighteen pounds after the weigh-in, I was a little outsized.”
At lightweight, Sanchez said he hopes to eventually face B.J. Penn. Then he proceeded to bash “The Prodigy” for showing up to face Georges St. Pierre without getting himself in good enough shape.
“It’s a bad idea for [B.J.] to fight anybody right now,” Sanchez said, in response to question about who he favored between Penn and Kenny Florian. Sanchez said that Penn had "no cardio," and couldn’t believe he went into the biggest fight of his life and got tired after the first round.
This remark accounted for some of the strongest words on the call. To say Sanchez and Stevenson don’t have a rivalry doesn’t quite do the situation justice. When they weren’t praising one another’s skill and professionalism, they were deferring politely to one another.
If you need bad blood in your main events, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you just want to see two experienced, aggressive guys go at it, you won’t.
That said, nobody sounds terribly excited about making the trip to London to fight. Stevenson explained the futility of trying to combat jet lag by altering your sleep schedule, while Sanchez put his complaints more succinctly: “The food I hear is crappy in London.”
Who knows, maybe it will help with the weight cut.
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what is diego going to do now that greg jackson isn’t lubing him up anymore?