A 36-year-old Conor McGregor making an MMA comeback to win Olympic gold at Los Angeles 2024? Crazier things have happened.
Earlier this month, the International Olympics Committee announced the addition of five new sports for Tokyo 2020.
Baseball [neé softball], karate, sport climbing, surfing, and skateboarding will all be at the next games, in four years time, and medals will be up for grabs.
UFC president Dana White is convinced that mixed martial arts has a place at the Olympic games and feels the IOC would also be open to it. White told UFC Unfiltered:
“My team has been working on that for a long time. Four or five years.
“We’ve been working on it. It’s going to happen. It’s eventually going to happen. It is just a matter of when and how many resources we want to put behind it.”
The fact that UFC fighters are paid professionals would not be an impediment to the sport’s inclusion. The recent games featured professionals from the sporting worlds of tennis, golf, basketball, football and more.
One way of getting into the IOC’s good books would be putting MMA up for consideration as a demonstration event at the next games.
At present, there are four candidate cities for the 2024 games – Rome, Paris, Budapest and Los Angeles.
McGregor would by 36 by the time 2024 comes around, as would Aisling Daly, who is in the UFC’s women’s strawweight division.
As for McGregor’s longevity, White is hopeful he drops down a weight class, or two, to prolong his career. He declared:
“Conor is such a super f**king talented athlete, right? You can only have so many of those [five-round] wars in your career. When he is at his right weight, he is awesome.
“I want to see him fight all the best guys in the world at his weight, not 30 pounds heavier.”
As McGregor once proclaimed, “When one of us go to war, we all go to war.”
Imagine taking that war to the Olympics.
