June 1st, 2008 by Jemaleddin Cole

I think a lot of people are miss­ing some­thing in the Gina Carano weigh-​in scan­dal. Yes, she failed to make weight, but she also failed to try to make weight. 3.5 pounds (or 3 pounds depend­ing on if the cloth­ing rule is true) is a lot to lose at that weight (and yes, weight is a more dif­fi­cult thing to manage for women in gen­eral - not being sexist, just being real­is­tic), but she prob­a­bly could have done it. Since she had the deal in place to trade those 3.5 pounds for an eighth of her purse even before she went to the weigh-​in, she had time where she could have been cut­ting weight that she instead spent cut­ting a deal.

I’m guess­ing that the think­ing went some­thing like this: Carano could attempt the cut and end up weak­ened in mind and body which would mean risk­ing her win bonus - and there­fore a full half of her pay.  Or she could save her­self a mis­er­able cut and just get to where she could on the scale but come in as fresh and strong as pos­si­ble, all for an eighth of her pay. That means making 75% more than if she lost the fight.

And I’d call that a pretty savvy deal.

Yes, you can argue that it would be better for her to have made weight. But was that a real­is­tic option? Should she have spent the lim­ited train­ing time she had focus­ing on sharp­en­ing up her strik­ing and jiu-​jitsu, or going on a crash diet? Now that we know the pres­sure she was under in having to agree to take this fight in order to keep her job with NBC, and rec­og­niz­ing that we don’t know every­thing else going on in her per­sonal life that might have been affect­ing her weight, it’s easy to see that while the choice she made wasn’t ideal, it may have been the smartest eco­nomic move avail­able to her.

Orig­i­nally posted on Bloody Elbow. Com­ments closed here.

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