Earlier this week, the UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo shoved No. 1 contender Chad Mendes during the UFC 179 media day in Brazil.
Today, Dana White is backtracking on Aldo’s admission, stating that is was simply a loss in translation.
“So the Aldo-Mendes thing, this has happened before. Aldo said, ‘that’s not what I said.’ He said he didn’t fake it, the push was real,” White told UFC.com. “But every time they say something in Portuguese and it gets translated into English – I got a call that [Renan] Barao had come out and said he wasn’t being paid enough money. So we called him, and he told me he never said that – it gets mixed up in translation.”
While it is certainly feasible that something was lost in translation from Aldo’s admission, it seems painfully clear that Aldo wanted to spice things up by purposefully pushing Mendes. The next day he let the cat out of the bag by admitting it was for promotion and now the UFC is trying to pick up the pieces.
In the end, the shove did not really cause too much of a stir, and by the time Mendes and Aldo get in the Octagon against one another, this will be long forgotten.
