Jared Vanderaa was supposed to fight on a week’s notice back in December, only to be pulled from his bout with Azamat Murzakanov shortly after weighing in.
The mishap transpired just after weigh-in on December 17, for what was the final UFC event of 2021. It had nothing to do with cutting weight, either. Instead, Vanderaa unfortunately opened a can of worms by mentioning a possible medical issue in passing.
“I made a comment about some past medical stuff. I made the comment knowing I could back up my claims that I was medically cleared, like I had actual proof that the UFC had,” Vanderaa told Cageside Press in an exclusive interview. “So I made the comment about my past medical claims, I’m like ‘oh yeah’ and they’re like ‘what you have this?’ and I’m like ‘no because you already have all my medicals about this stating I don’t.'”
That led to Vanderaa being forced to show he was cleared to compete, and have it double checked. The condition, in this case, was Marfan Syndrome. “It’s not necessarily an uncommon disease, but it’s not very common,” he noted. Vanderaa had a heart echo cardiogram from before he fought Sergey Spivak in February 2021, but the doctors ahead of the Murzakanov fight weren’t willing to accept it, wanting to double check things. Vanderaa, admittedly, didn’t help his own case. “In their defense, I f*cking hate doctors, I think most of them are idiotic and stupid, so let’s just say I wasn’t the sweetest to them either. I was sort of getting snappy with it.”
In the end, because he’d alerted them to Marfan, they required him to undergo genetic testing, which ruled out Marfan syndrome completely. However, a fight with Chris Barnett in January also fell through after Barnett pulled out due to injury.
Instead, Vanderaa is back in another short-notice fight situation, this time against former heavyweight champ Andrei Arlovski. “The Mountain” found out about the match-up for just days prior to it being announced. “I signed the contract literally Thursday morning,” Vanderaa recalled, immediately after his manager called him. “And it was announced the next day that we were fighting.”
From there, it was set: Vanderaa was fighting Andrei Arlovski in less than two weeks. That fight now arrives Saturday. And should something happen to the co-main event on Saturday, Vanderaa is ready to step up. Or, has it put it when asked if he’d fill in against Tai Tuivasa or Derrick Lewis, “f*ck it, let’s go!”
Watch our full interview with UFC 271 heavyweight Jared Vanderaa above.
