Tom Aspinall is still suffering significant vision problems three days after his controversial no-contest against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321, the heavyweight champion’s father and coach said Tuesday.
Aspinall’s contest with Gane ended in a no-contest Saturday in Abu Dhabi after Aspinall suffered a grisly double eye-poke in the closing minute of Round 1 — the first UFC title bout to end in a no-contest due to eye-pokes. In an update released on Aspinall’s YouTube channel, Andy Aspinall stated the champ’s right eye “still can’t see anything” and his left eye remains “really, really blurry.” The elder Aspinall said his son has undergone a battery of tests this week in England, and while doctors determined nothing is torn behind the eye, Aspinall still isn’t out the woods regarding his long-term health.
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Said Andy Aspinall:
“[Doctors] said it’s bad, it’s not good. But his eye is a little bit more closed than it was. His right eye, he still can’t see anything. He said it’s just grey, and they tested him on words and he just couldn’t see anything. His left eye, 50% — he went down about four letters and then he just couldn’t see the letters. So one’s really, really blurry and one’s still not working.
“He said it was really bad, how it looks.
“He said sometimes when your eyes heal like that, it can become displaced and stay there. And they did a few tests on that and they said it doesn’t seem like that, and his vision on the eye that’s the best eye, his eye wasn’t following properly, so the muscles weren’t working strong enough to [turn]. This one [the right eye] just wasn’t working that good at all, so we’ve got to have additional tests for this week and … he’s got obviously a CT scan to see if the bones are all right, but they think the bones are all right.”
Aspinall was deemed unable to continue by a cageside physician and was sent to the hospital in the immediate aftermath of UFC 321. The bout was Aspinall’s first since July 2024, and first as an undisputed champion despite holding an interim UFC heavyweight title since late 2023. UFC CEO Dana White has since confirmed a championship rematch with Gane is likely next.
The entire saga has become a divisive point of contention within the sport in the days since UFC 321, with a particularly vocal sect of fans and fighters questioning Aspinall’s inability to continue following a first round that likely would’ve been scored for Gane. Many of Aspinall’s peers, however, have come to the UFC heavyweight champion’s defense, decrying the prevalence of eye-pokes in the UFC and the lack of punishment or policing when it comes to the fouls that ended UFC 321’s main event.
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Andy Aspinall acknowledged his son has been in “a foul mood” since Saturday’s incident.
“He’s not in a happy place, he’s not making his home life that happy, because he’s mad, sad, upset, whatever, that we’ve spent — he’s had three or four years now we’ve taken a fight in the [early morning hours], taken a fight on short notice, been a backup fighter, sitting around waiting for Jon Jones, and then we get a fight but it’s been 15 months. So he’s had three minutes of fight time in however long it’s been, and he’s just mad that we’ve trained long and hard and lots of cardio, to try and do a longer fight because everybody says Tom can’t do that — well, we’ll show that he can do that.
“He’s mad that he didn’t get to show what we think he can do.
“You see the socials — I don’t give a s*** what people say or do. It doesn’t bother me. They’ve got opinions and they think they’re right, or they’ve got opinions and they want some attention coming to themselves, or they’ve got opinions and they want to make a video to make some money. Let them do that if they want to do that, I’m not bothered by any of that. I’m just bothered that my kid’s got a job that he likes, and he wants to do it, and he’s been fouled in a contest — the guy who fouled him, no consequence to him, and now there’s a consequence to Tom. And hopefully it’ll be all right, but it might not be.”
