Since Daniel Cormier announced that he’d have to back out of UFC 200 due to injury there’s been a war of words between him and challenger Jon Jones.
This along with an optimistic MRI result has DC saying that his return to the octagon could come sooner rather than later.
“You know my knee, my ACL has been torn forever,” Cormier said. “So I get stem cells done to my ACL to try to help with the healing, it also takes out some of the inflammation when my leg starts to lock up. I do the stem cells and it helps. I’m not going to do the surgery. I’m 37 years old, if I do the surgery it may put me out for too long. I want to get back as soon as possible. I’m going to do stem cells to my leg. Hopefully that will help speed up the process, and get some stuff done to my shoulder. I’m pretty beat up right now as you would expect to get back for a hard training camp. But I will do everything in my power to try to get back as soon as I can.”
Cormier went as far as saying that UFC 200 was within his recovery time frame.
“If they’re telling me in 4-6 weeks I’m supposed to be better, that would leave me with 10-12 weeks to train for UFC 200, I could be ready to fight then. The only thing with that is, it’s a little scary because Jon is fighting in April. I don’t know if he will be willing to turn around and fight right back again three months later. If he would, I’d love to run it back with him any time in the summer late summer, early summer, it doesn’t matter.”
The UFC takes these things into account and if Jon Jones was to stop Ovince St. Preux early in their UFC 197 fight it’d be reasonable for them to ask Jon to pull the quick turn around.