Taila Santos, the 2nd ranked UFC women’s flyweight had fought through a broken orbital bone in her UFC 275 contest against division champion Valentina Shevchenko, as her manager Tiago Okamura has revealed.
Taila Santos kept on fighting even with an orbital bone fracture under right eye
Even though Valentina Shevchenko had the last laugh in the co-main event of UFC 275, Talia Santos exceeded her expectations and despite going into the bout as an underdog and kept on par with the champion in the early rounds with her grappling skills.
However, in the third round, the neck-to-neck contest saw a change of flow after Shevchenko and Santos had a brutal head clash, which resulted in the latter having a massive eye swelling and from thereon, “Bullet” took the upperhand to finish with a split decision victory, marking her seventh title defense.
Following the event, Santos was immediately rushed to a hospital, where diagnosis revealed that the Brazilian had suffered an orbital bone fracture under the right eye during the head collision with Shevchenko.
During an interview with MMA Fighting, Tiago Okamura detailed Santos’ injury and also added that they are opting to fly to Brazil for surgery, even though there was an option to undergo the surgery in Singapore.
“We had two option. To have surgery here, and God knows how long we’d have to stay and how the recovery would take, or wait two weeks for the swelling to reduce a little bit and then have the surgery,” said Okamura.
“The doctors said the long flight [back to Brazil] would not be a problem, and we would have a better support back home, since [Taila Santos] would only stay with one person [in Singapore],” the manager added.
In addition to Santos, it was Shevchenko who had also fought with an injury, as the Kyrgyzstani-Peruvian fighter’s victory wasn’t followed up with her ceremonial victory dance and in the interview after the bout, Shevchenko revealed that she went into the fight with a foot injury.
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