Struve Breaks His Silence On UFC 175 Fainting Incident

“It started when we were still in the hotel room. I started to feel a little dizzy and not well, and it took me a little bit to get over that. I ate something, we went down and I felt better. We actually went to the UFC’s doctor and told them. They checked me, everything was good, all the functions were good, it had nothing to do with my heart. So we went into the locker room, started to warm up, everything went well. Then I went into the bathroom and I was just walking back and forth, and the tension just became more and more out of nowhere. It was incredible, something I’ve never experienced. And I just fell over onto a bucket of ice against the wall. I was really ashamed. I didn’t really know what happened. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“And of course the first thing, I thought it was my heart because I went through so much with my heart, and of course when that happened my heart started pounding like crazy. I lost control of my breathing, and when the UFC came in and told me that they’d cancelled the fight, they couldn’t let me fight like that, of course it got even worse.”

“I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t able to really think about it the way I’ve done right now. The only thing I thought was: ‘I just dropped. I was out with a heart issue. Nobody’s going to want me to fight again, no matter what. This is it. I’m not ever going to fight again after all I’ve been through, after fighting so hard to get to a point where I’m at right now.

…
“It really sucked, that day. We took a good look at everything that happened, and I think we figured it all out. I can’t wait to fight December 13th and close this book full of bad things happening to me.”

In a recent interview with MMAFighting.com, UFC heavyweight Stefan Struve discussed what happened when he fainted backstage prior to his UFC 175 fight against Matt Mitrione.

During the interview Struve also blamed a prescription he was taking as the likely culprit for the fallout.