Aljamain Sterling returned to the win column at UFC Fight Night 257, but didn’t come out unscathed.
Sterling (20-5 MMA, 17-5 UFC) shut out Brian Ortega (16-5 MMA, 8-5 UFC) by unanimous decision in their five-round co-main event this past Saturday at Shanghai Indoor Stadium in Shanghai.
The former UFC bantamweight champion revealed that he injured his arm when landing a spinning back fist on Ortega during their fight.
“So I got my MRI back: Grade 2 tear in my tricep,” Sterling revealed on his YouTube channel. “But they said strain. As he’s reading the report, he goes, ‘Grade 2 strain.’ So I’m relaxed, I’m chilling. I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just a strain. I’ll be back, no problem. That’s not like a tear or anything.’ Ryan goes, ‘A strain is a tear. What are you talking about?’ But yeah, I’ve got a partial tear in my tricep tendon. The thing is still a balloon.”
Despite the injury, the now top five ranked UFC featherweight still hopes he can fight once more before the end of the year.
“I’m a little bit saddened by that because obviously the momentum, riding a wave right now then that happens,” Sterling said. “I’m thinking maybe I can be back and ready to compete by December, which I still think I can. It just depends on how fast this heals.”
Sterling almost didn’t get to compete after Ortega was hospitalized due to his struggle with the weight cut. The fight was contested at a 153-pound catchweight instead, and Sterling addressed those putting an asterisk on his win.
“I guess he got like two bags of IV, came back, he still looked like death,” Sterling said of Ortega. “But the only thing that doesn’t surprise me is he’s looked like that on multiple occasions on the scale, and he comes out and he still puts on a dog fight – all the time, and sometimes he wins.
“I know some people were trying to discredit the win saying, ‘You couldn’t even finish a half-dead Brian Ortega.’ And I’m like, which one of these guys have finished Brian Ortega half dead? None of these guys. He’s got one doctor’s stoppage in his entire career. The guy’s a dog. He might have taken the first two rounds off, but I do think he was trying to play the long game, trying to get me tired, to exert a lot of energy in the very beginning.”
