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05th Oct 2017

Kevin Lee has an absolutely outrageous amount of weight to cut before UFC 216

He has less than 24 hours!

Ben Kiely

Kevin Lee has a lot of work to do before his first crack at UFC gold.

Before he can fight for the interim UFC lightweight title, Kevin Lee must first make championship weight. There’s no one pound leeway in title fights, so in order to be eligible for the belt, he must tip the scales at 155 lbs or lower.

That’s a tall task for the Detroit native, considering he was bragging to the media at the UFC 216 open workouts that he had chowed down on tiramisu the previous night.

 

“Oh yeah, yeah, I didn’t take a picture of it. And I just enjoy tiramisu, I ain’t no bitch. If you out there and tiramisu is the reason why you don’t go out there and make a lot of money and put your life on the line for these folks then eh… and I ain’t got 4,000 Russians showing up for me!”

That was clearly a wisecrack at Khabib Nurmagomedov’s expense. The undefeated Dagestani was forced to withdraw from his interim title shot against Tony Ferguson at UFC 209 on the day of the weigh-ins. Nurmagomedov was hospitalised due to weight-cutting related issues and a clip of him eating tiramisu on the Countdown show promoting the fight went viral after he was pulled from the card.

While that joke got a few laughs off the journos in Vegas, there was genuine concern about Lee after he told everyone he weighed 174 lbs, four pounds over the welterweight limit, the next weight class up.

This means that ‘the Motwon Phenom’ must shed 19 pounds in about 20 hours if he wants to be able to take the belt with a win over ‘El Cucuy’ on Sunday.