It didn’t take long for that frown to be turned upside down at the helm of Team Europe.
The headline after episode one of The Ultimate Fighter was most definitely “Conor McGregor’s sparring partner fails to make it into The Ultimate Fighter House.”
But the script was flipped on episode two when UFC president Dana White revealed that he had decided to offer a second chance to two fighters who had lost in the preliminary round.
“I’m shaking things up a little bit here,” White said as he addressed the teams in The Ultimate Fighter gym.
“The fights to get into the house this season were phenomenal so I’ve been thinking and what I wanted to do was… I asked these two ‘if you could bring back one guy, who would you bring back?’
“No secret here, he (McGregor) picked Artem to come back. He (Urijah Faber) picked Johnny. So I’m bringing these two back.”
With that, both Artem Lobov and Johnny Nunez emerged from the dressing room to join their respective teams.
Nunez was submitted by the impressive Ryan Hall in the first round of fights while Lobov lost out on a close decision to Mehdi Baghdad.
With eighteen fighters remaining in the competition rather than sixteen, that means that there will be nine fighters left at the quarter-final stage and White went on to explain that one fighter will miss out on the quarter-finals as he will decide which competitor impressed him the least in the next series of fights and that one fighter will be eliminated.
That twist comes as a refreshing incentive for fighters to put on an exciting performance and leave a mark in the mind of the boss man.
We got the chance to meet up with Lobov last week where he explained his hope to be given another shot by Dana White and… well… it seemed to work out pretty damn well.
