Gastelum Coach on Bad Weight Cut: “I was scared”

“He wasn’t vomiting food. It was more like mucus. He was in a bad state where he couldn’t get himself off the floor. I had to pick him up. I was scared. I’ve never had an athlete do that before. That’s the long and short of it.

“I was thinking the fight was off. There’s no way this guy is fighting, it’s done. … That was kind of the attitude. Maybe it was a little bit quick to the make the decision, but that’s how I felt at the time.”

“I’m not saying it was an easy weight cut, it never is. But it was going as well as it could until that happened. People can say what they want, but that’s the only difference in my book for this weight cut.”

“I always leave these decisions up to Kelvin. I’m a coach. Of course, I’m a support system. Do I think that he’s 100 percent? I do not, no. Do I think that he’ll do great and that he’s capable of winning the fight? Absolutely. He’ll come to fight.”

“Kelvin wasn’t feeling well in the front end of the week. That’s one of the reasons he was a little heavy at the front end of the week. But ultimately we felt like the weight cut was going fine. Everything was going good. We used different stimuli. He was consistently losing weight.”

In a new interview with MMAFighting.com‘s Marc Raimondi, Kelvin Gastelum’s coach Chance Farrar detailed the difficulties with this week’s weight cut.

Gastelum weighed in 9 pounds over the welterweight limit during yesterday’s UFC 183 weigh-ins event, and he was fined 30% of his purse as a result.