Chael Sonnen claims Conor McGregor is 27 pounds over featherweight limit
On Saturday at UFC 189, McGregor meets Chad Mendes for the interim featherweight championship in Las Vegas. However, he will be forced to shed some serious pounds before the fight to meet the required divisional limit of 145 pounds.
How serious?
27 pounds serious.
According to former UFC middleweight contender Chael Sonnen, who appeared on an episode of the Jim Rome Show to discuss UFC 189, he recently saw McGregor and was blown away by his size.
Sonnen, being the former fighter he is, immediately had to ask McGregor about his weight with a title fight just over a week away, “I was like, ‘Conor, what do you weigh?’ he said, ‘about 172 pounds.’
“He’s got to be 145 in eight days.”
A veteran with a fair share of tough weight cuts over his decade-plus career, Sonnen was asked how McGregor could possibly cut 27 pounds in such a short amount of time. He said it can be done, but it won’t be easy.
“I don’t know how he’s gonna do it,” Sonnen said. “He’s very lean. He’s got a very busy media schedule. He’s training out in Las Vegas. He was in L.A. doing Conan last night. He was in New York doing Reebok the day before that. He was in Connecticut the day before that, with us at ESPN.
“One, how does he lose the weight? And two, how does he find the time? I don’t know.”
If you need a visual aid to get an idea just how large McGregor actually is, look no further than last week’s Reebok Fight Kit unveiling in New York City.
McGregor posed with middleweight champion Chris Weidman and the champ released it via social media. In the picture, Weidman is certainly the larger fighter. However, shockingly, it really isn’t by that much – especially when you take into account that Weidman is, himself, considered large for his division…a division that is a full 40 pounds heavier than McGregor’s.
Good thing for “King Conor” that Sin City is sweltering well into the triple digits and his fight camp has been almost exclusively in Las Vegas. So, if he is looking to sweat out almost 30 pounds in a week, he couldn’t have asked for better conditions.
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Ryan McKinnell is a contributor for the Yahoo Sports Cagewriter blog. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
