PARIS – Fernand Lopez won’t make any excuses on behalf of Ciryl Gane.
The coach of MMA Factory knows they failed in their goal to take the UFC heavyweight title in March when they faced Jon Jones at UFC 285. A lot of people were disappointed to not only see Gane (11-2 MMA, 8-2 UFC) come up short, but also see him tap out in just two minutes of the fight.
Many have pointed at Gane’s mentality, while others have questioned his dedication to training and quality of wrestling preparation. Lopez shut down all those questions and simply said Jones was the better man that night.
“What’s good about this sport is that MMA can humble you and make you think twice,” Lopez said. “I’ve become more humble. There more I know, the more I grow and the more I learn, the more I feel small and I don’t know anything. I don’t know what happened. I cannot be sure of what happened. I can just tell you what I know. What I know is that I felt him fine all the way, all the training. I felt him serious about Jon Jones. He knew what he was doing.
“… Ciryl was focused. He wanted to win the fight. I wanted to win the fight, and we failed, and we just have to take that. If you have a race, 100-meter race, and you and me decide to run. If you run better than me, that can be the case that I didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re just better than me, and you beat me in the race. This is something that can happen. Let’s stop trying to point to someone and say, ‘Who did this? Who didn’t do this?’ No, sometimes you just have to understand that Jon Jones was good that day. He was in a state of flow and he was good. We did a couple of mistakes and that’s it.”
Gane returns to the octagon this Saturday in his home country of France. He takes on Serghei Spivac (16-3 MMA, 7-3 UFC) in a key heavyweight matchup that serves as the main event of UFC Fight Night 226.
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC Fight Night 226.
