Jean Silva reveals camp injury nightmare before Noche UFC main event submission win

Jean Silva submitted Jose Delgado in the main event of Noche UFC in Glendale, Arizona, but the Brazilian featherweight has since revealed he entered fight night carrying the scars of one of the most disrupted training camps of his UFC career.

Silva was originally booked to face former interim featherweight champion Yair Rodriguez in a five-round contest. Rodriguez withdrew injured with less than a month to go, and Delgado stepped in on short notice — news that arrived the day after Silva had opened a cut over his right eye in training.

“Four weeks before the fight, I opened [a cut over] my eye,” Silva said in a video posted to his YouTube channel. “The day after I had the cut, I got the news that my opponent had been changed. With my eye cut, I thought, ‘Damn, changing opponents now, with my eye like this, what’s it going to be like?’ But all right, I closed my eye and trusted my team.”

The problems did not stop there. Silva had already been dealing with a shin infection that prevented him from throwing kicks, and that was followed by a broken toe on the foot next to the big toe. A hip issue then emerged, and a sparring knockdown in boxing rounded out a camp he described as riddled with setbacks.

“After my shin got better, I broke a toe,” Silva said. “There was nothing I could do about it, so we kept training. After that, I started feeling something in my hip, but those were things that never made me stop training, never, but they did make me change the way I trained.”

“After that, I got knocked down in a boxing sparring session. It was nasty. Nasty,” he added. “I had several problems.”

Weight-cut complications added to the difficulty. Silva made championship weight on the Friday morning but struggled to rehydrate, vomiting several times and arriving at the arena on fight day weighing around 161 pounds — with clothes and shoes on — by his own account.

The fight itself was far from straightforward. Delgado, making his first UFC main event appearance, hurt Silva on the feet in round one, but the Fighting Nerds representative turned the contest around in rounds two and three before forcing a tapout with a choke.

“Everybody gives me shit like, ‘Man, what a crazy first round,’” Silva said. “Look, it was really risky, but I’m only going to become champion because I take more risks than all of you who criticize me. We knew this could happen. We had rehearsed every scenario.”

Silva also said he picked up on a tell from Delgado during the fight — noticing the Arizona native appeared to sing to himself when trying to reset mentally — and used that as a cue to press forward. “When I saw him singing in front of me, I thought, ‘Oh,’” Silva said. “Every single one of his strikes was something we already knew about.”