Irish Minister of State for Tourism and Sport Michael Ring has promised a crackdown on the country’s mixed martial arts (MMA) promoters, saying he had long feared an incident of the kind that led to Portuguese fighter Joao Carvalho’s death in Dublin.
Carvalho, 28 died from injuries he received during his third-round technical knockout loss to Ireland’s Charlie “Hospital” Ward in a welterweight contest at a Total Extreme Fighting (TEF) event in the Irish capital on Saturday.
He underwent brain surgery and spent the next 48 hours in critical condition in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital before dying late on Monday.
Video footage showed he had endured nine punches to his head after being knocked down before the fight was stopped.
“I saw this coming down the line before anybody else,” Ring told Newstalk Radio on Wednesday. “I wrote to these operators and I told them I expected them to have the same standards as every other sporting event in the country and I certainly will continue to do that.”
Police on Wednesday confirmed they were looking into the circumstances of Carvalho’s death, and that a file would be prepared for the Dublin Coroner’s Court in line with protocol in all investigations into cases of sudden death. A post-mortem examination was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, the results of which may shed more light on the cause of death.
There has been widespread criticism in Ireland of the sport itself and of the way the bout was officiated in particular.
Ward’s father, Charlie Sr, said on RTE, Ireland’s national radio station, that the referee should have ended the fight sooner when he saw the punishment Carvalho was taking. He said his son was not to blame.
“He didn’t go out to kill anyone. It’s just one of these unfortunate things,” he said. “He went out to win his fight, but the referee could have been a bit quicker as far as I’m concerned.”
However, the referee, Mariusz Domasat, denied he should have stopped the fight any sooner.
“If you watch the fight, you see clearly there was no reason to stop the fight earlier,” he told the Irish Daily Star newspaper. “I stopped the fight when there was a reason to stop the fight, when the fighter wasn’t willing to fight anymore, that’s it.”
Wider concerns about the regulation of the sport have also been expressed, with some calling for an outright ban.
Consultant neurologist Tim Lynch said that the sport should be outlawed.
“I find it abhorrent that you’d be having any sport where you’d be trying to hit and knock a player out and cause brain damage,” he told Newstalk. “So from a personal perspective yes, I think those types of sports should not be allowed.”
However, Conor McGregor, Ireland’s best-known MMA fighter, who was at the event and also suggested that the bout should have been stopped sooner, defended the sport.
“It is easy for those on the outside to criticize our way of living, but for the millions of people around the world who have had their lives, their health, their fitness and their mental strength all changed for the better through combat, this is truly a bitter pill to swallow,” he said on Facebook.
MMA fans in Ireland have set up a crowdfunding page to raise money to send Carvalho’s body home for burial. It currently has more than 8,678 euros (US$9,797) in pledges.
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