Israel Adesanya has been one of the busiest UFC champions of all time. Adesanya became a champion back in 2018. He’s defended the title on average every 163 days since.
But Adesanya has also had a peculiar medical condition as far back as September of 2020. In the lead up to the event against Paulo Costa, Adesanya was spotted with a pretty significant case of gynecomastia.
Gynecomastia is usually indicative of PED use so naturally MMA fans proceeded to mock him. In lead up to Alex Pereira main event, Adesanya’s condition once again surfaced. It was also clear he was quite sensitive about it as well.
Adesanya wound up losing his title in the fifth round by the skin of one’s teeth. During the presser afterwards, he revealed he won’t be looking at a quick turn around and is instead looking to deal with ‘medical issues’.
“I mean, I don’t disclose everything. I’ve had some stuff that, you know, some medical stuff that I’ve just put on the back burner. It was stuff that people make fun of me for. “
“I mean, yeah, I just got to look after myself because my health comes first. Even think about Chadwick Boseman when everyone was making fun of him.”
“All he looks. So this. He looks so skinny. He looks so sleepy. Not knowing, behind the scenes, he was fighting cancer. “
“People always make fun of me about, you know, my and my chest and other things, but they don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m going through in life, but I just keep everything on the back burner.”
Boseman was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer back in 2016. He never spoke about it publicly, only revealing the condition to a handful of non-family members.
In his illness, he became a movie star. He successfully starred in Black Panther, Avengers, 21 Bridges and Da 5 Bloods – all while undergoing chemotherapy and dealing with his health issues.
Boseman died of complications related to his diagnosis in August of 2020, he was 43 years old.
Adesanya confirmed he’s looking forward to returning to the octagon: “So I just got some things to fix first. ”