Is Carlos Ulberg going to be the latest light heavyweight champion forced to relinquish his belt? That may still be the case, but UFC CEO Dana White says the promotion isn’t rushing to a decision.
The UFC light heavyweight belt has been on quite the journey since Jon Jones dropped it for the last time in 2020. In the six years since it’s changed hands eight times … and has been relinquished twice due to injuries. Jiri Prochazka was asked by UFC to give the title up after suffering a horrific shoulder injury, and then Jamahal Hill also vacated after rupturing his Achilles tendon playing a pickup game of basketball.
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Carlos Ulberg won the title at UFC 327, but blew his knee out badly in the process. All signs point towards him being out for a year. So is another big ask (or at least an interim title) coming from the UFC? During the UFC Winnipeg post fight presser, White laid out the current situation with Ulberg and where they’re at.
“One of the good things about it is he was at Power Slap last night and I was talking to him,” White said. “And he’s gonna stay in Vegas. He’s got the surgery, and he’s gonna start working at the [UFC Performance Institute]. Apparently where he lives in Australia, he’s in a remote part of the country, so there isn’t much around him.”
“What we would do before we built the Performance Institute is we would get these guys surgeries with great doctors, and then they’d go home, and they wouldn’t do anything, they didn’t do any physical therapy or recovery. Now with the PI, that place has saved more fights and helped more athletes prolong their careers. We’ll get him in there, and see how fast he starts to recover and we always figure it out.”
Asked if they had talked about an interim belt, White replied “We have not. Carlos is still getting set up here and we’ll figure it out.”
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Ulberg’s belt is safe for now because there’s no big light heavyweight match-up in the wings and no major event in desperate need of a headline title fight. That’s when necessity overrides niceties and the UFC makes the tough decision to create an interim or ask a fighter to relinquish. Which gives Ulberg … around six months to enjoy being undisputed champion, by our estimate.
