Cutting weight not fun. There have been many instances of weight-cutting that went wrong with UFC fighters. “The weight cut is hard for him,” ex-featherweight champion Ilia Topuria‘s manager said recently when he made the move to lightweight. But that’s just an instance where the fighter didn’t have to get medical attention for cutting weight, unlike 29-0 legend Khabib Nurmagomedov, who was hospitalized once. Yes, weight cuts can be quite deadly if not done properly.

Did you know that weight-cutting caused three athletes within a small period of time to lose their lives? UFC legend Chael Sonnen recently took us down memory lane to 1997, when three NCAA wrestlers—Jeff Reese, Joseph LaRosa, and Billy Saylor—were cutting weight while consuming creatine and shedding pounds inside a sauna.

“There was a year. The year was called 1998 [it was actually 1997]. There’s a sports organization known as the NCAA. Three wrestlers had died within the same season, the wrestling season is small. It’s three months, four months, and they all died cutting weight,” Chael Sonnen stated on his YouTube channel. “Later, we found out they were all taking something called creatine when they locked themselves in a sauna, and the correlation between creatine and dehydration and ultimately the death.”

In the meantime, the officials who were in charge of wrestling did not get any help from the NCAA to launch an investigation into it, which surprised Chael Sonnen. Instead, the officials took it upon themselves to “come with a cure” and, immediately during that season, added a few more pounds to the weight limit in every weight class.

“Wrestling knew that the NCAA cared so little about them and was going to put so little emphasis into looking out and investigating and getting to the bottom of it that wrestling itself must come with a cure,” Chael Sonnen added. “What wrestling did, they added seven pounds to every weight. Right there [during] mid-season… If you wrestled at 118 pounds, you now wrestle at 126 pounds.”

While it’s unclear if the deaths of the three aforementioned fighters could have been avoided, the lack of action from the NCAA to get to the bottom of this prompted  significant changes to be made to the weight class rule in 1998. Weight cutting not only harms an athlete, but it can also be the reason why their sporting career get cut short. According to Chael Sonnen, one man who eventually called it quits because of gruelling weight cuts is Khabib Nurmagomedov. Let’s take a look at what he had to say on that front.

Chael Sonnen claims Khabib Nurmagomedov retired due to weight-cut issues

Most fans would know that Khabib Nurmagomedov retired after his successful title defense at UFC 254 against Justin Gaethje. While his father wanted him to continue fighting, possibly to 30-0, it was his mother who requested that he stop fighting, according to ‘The Eagle’. It was a pretty tough pill to swallow for the Dagestan native, but Chael Sonnen recently suggested that there was more to Khabib’s retirement than just his father’s death. It was also him trying to avoid further issues with weight cuts, leading them to bid farewell to the sport.

“The number one reason fighters retire is ’cause they don’t wanna make weight anymore,” Chael Sonnen stated in a YouTube video last month. “Khabib, 29-0, just for example, they would’ve got to 30-0. They were changing the wrong numbers. They were adding commas and zeros. They needed to change the weight class… You would’ve got Khabib, you’d have got him one more time [if he moved up in weight class].”

Athlete well-being should definitely be at the forefront of every sporting organization’s operations. In that sense, what do you think about massive weight cuts and the wrestling committee’s move to tackle the issue in 1997 after the three athletes passed away? Drop your comments below.