Will the UFC prove anything about sports in the age of COVID-19?
One way or another, yes. But we won’t know right away.
UFC 249 will leave one indelible impact: It will go down in the record books as the first major sporting event held in the United States since the sports world shut down in response to the pandemic and most of the nation went under stay-at-home orders. You can rest assured UFC president Dana White, with his us-against-the-world mentality, will no doubt crow about sticking it to all his imaginary haters for pulling this show off.
That’s the short term. In the long term, there are two ways this could go: The worst-case scenario is an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier spreads the disease during fight week, and within two weeks, there is an outbreak of the disease among the families and friends of the fighters, cornermen, UFC staff, cameramen, officials, and so on. No one is rooting for this, but we can’t pretend this isn’t a possibility. In any case, UFC would be tagged as the entity that took the viral spread and made it worse by starting too soon.
Then there’s the other outcome: The UFC goes ahead and produces UFC 249, and next week’s two Jacksonville events, the events run smoothly, and no one gets sick. The UFC is clearly doing everything in their power to assure this is the case, going so far as to nix the usual postfight octagon interview and pre-fight faceoffs. In that case, UFC could go down as the sports promotion which got the ball rolling again and led the way for other sports to follow suit, and figure out their own paths back to competition. In that scenario, the UFC wins big.
Regardless of whatever comes right out of fight night, it will be some time before we get a definitive answer.
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