According to the American, the Brazilian was injured because he doesn’t use a helmet in sparring, which is primarily designed to protect against dissections.
“He doesn’t use a helmet, and that’s incredibly stupid,” Thomson said on another edition of the WEIGHING IN podcast. “You don’t need a helmet to protect you from getting knocked out – it’s protection from dissections. I don’t understand that. When I bought myself a very expensive helmet with big cheek pads, big seals around my eyes and chin, I did it to avoid dissections.”
“The reason why people are more likely to get dissections at the end of training camp is because they don’t want to get hard, like ‘I have a fight next week, I need to slow down.’ They become less aggressive, and as a result, they’re not as fast, and as a result, they lag a second and their head stays in a position it shouldn’t be in”
Last week, Charles Oliveira revealed that a head-to-head collision had severely split his eyebrow in his last training session before flying out to the venue, and UFC chief, Dana White, announced Russian-born Australian Alexander Volkanovski as his new opponent, who agreed to step in as a replacement on short notice.
Recall that the UFC 294 tournament, the main event of which will be a title fight in the lightweight division, will be held on October 21 in Abu Dhabi.