Ever heard MMA described like this before?

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Canada a key market for once underground ‘ultimate fighting’

After gaining wide popularity in Canada, ultimate fighting is now attracting challengers here from abroad, including France where the ultra-violent, full-contact combat sport is banned.

From miserable beginnings in the 1990s, when contenders in caged hexagon rings hammered on one another in bloody and often clandestine matches, it has become a legitimate professional sport in several jurisdictions in Canada.

A combination of boxing, wrestling and several martial arts, mixed martial arts or MMA, as it is now called, continues to be tagged by most media as brutal, having resulted in two deaths in the United States in 2007 and 2010.

Regardless, its popularity has soared and its pay-per-view business now rivals boxing and wrestling.

Despite a cracked rib, Moise Rimbon of France, after winning a match on warm, recent night in Sherbrooke, Quebec, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Montreal, downplayed the brutality of the sport.

“Had I been boxing, I’d have a black eye, for sure,” he told AFP. “I’d have a swollen head. Now I’m fighting with smaller gloves and I don’t have a scratch on my face.

“It’s a mix of boxing and wrestling that makes it possible to mitigate the impact of certain punches,” he explained.

To compete in the sport, however, he and a handful of fellow Frenchmen had to leave their home country and immigrate to Canada — where French is one of two official languages with English — to participate in matches organized by the US-based Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

Competitors from several other countries have also established themselves in Canada, but their exact numbers and origins are not recorded.

Almost every weekend in the country, UFC fighters weigh in and let each other have it before millions of fans watching worldwide.

Based in Las Vegas, the UFC held its first event in 1993 in Denver, Colorado. At first shunned by some countries, the sport caught on and according to Forbes, the business magazine, grew in 10 years from a largely underground affair to a business valued at more than $1 billion.

Today the UFC is authorized in most US states and many countries including Britain, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and notably Canada, which has become a key market due to fewer restrictions on hosting matches and a large fan base for the sport.

Bouts were first legalized in Quebec in 1998, but are still prohibited in a handful of smaller eastern provinces and in western Saskatchewan.

The sport is harshly criticized by the Canadian Medical Association, which points to the after-effects of hits on the brain and is pushing for it to be banned.

Supporters, meanwhile, want the sport legalized nationwide. Ryan Leef, a former fighter and MP from Canada’s Yukon territory, has presented a law before parliament to tweak the criminal code, which at present only allows fists to be used in amateur fights.

To get around the federal law, several jurisdictions labeled MMA a professional sport. Leef wants to eliminate this ambiguity in the criminal code.

“Banning (MMA) is not the answer,” he said. “Making it safer for the athletes, having proper regulation and guidelines is the answer.

“Burying our head in the sand and saying ‘there’s a risk of injury and so we should ban it’ is not an appropriate measure and it is not a measure that Canadians are going to accept, nor the athletes in that sport.”

Leef has received support from other Canadian lawmakers, including Liberal MP ****** Trudeau — son of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau — who this month boxed with a Conservative senator to raise money for cancer research.

Young Trudeau, with his longer reach, won by technical knockout in three two-minute rounds against Senator Patrick Brazeau.

For Frenchman Jean-Philippe Daoust, who was ringside during countryman Rimbon’s match in Sherbrooke, mixed martial arts “arouses animal instincts”.

“We fight however we can, with whatever means are available, with all that we have,” he told AFP. “At the end of the day, it’s the last man standing, the one who is fittest who is crowned the winner.”

http://www.theaustralianeye.com/new...nderground-ultimate-fighting-aoi35831587.html

 

Comes as no surprise Stoo

 

Ultimate Fightings Indian Fightings Providers...

Isn't that live on Youtube later?

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