The most toxic scenario in MMA looks like this:
a champion stops a fight after an eye poke — and immediately gets branded as “couldn’t handle it.” Then a month passes, and it turns out it wasn’t “just a sting,” but a set of injuries that people generally don’t walk into a cage with.
With Tom Aspinall, that’s exactly the story right now. And it’s a lot nastier than just a canceled rematch with Gane.
How it looked in the moment
In the fight with Ciryl Gane, in the first round, a poke landed in both eyes. Tom didn’t continue the bout — and he was instantly picked apart: “he could’ve endured it,” “he overreacted,” “he broke mentally.”
Even Dana White, to put it mildly, didn’t offer unconditional support: you could hear “well… Tom chose to stop, and now the rematch will be even hotter” between the lines.
And against that backdrop, the story took a very slippery turn.
Right after the event, the doctors on site said Aspinall’s eyes seemed to be fine.
And that became perfect fuel for the hate: if “everything’s fine,” then “he just didn’t want to continue.”
But then something happened that usually shatters internet certainty.
London: “we’ve actually got six problems here”
Aspinall and his father went to a specialized clinic in London (the examination was on November 21), and later Tom showed the results. At that point it wasn’t about “fine/not fine,” but about very specific diagnoses.
In short, what they found:
- soft-tissue injury around the orbit and issues with visual coordination;
- bilateral traumatic Brown syndrome (a rare condition linked to restricted eye movement);
- diplopia — the double vision (especially when looking up/sideways);
- reduced visual acuity;
- noticeably impaired peripheral visual field;
- a minimally displaced fracture of the medial wall of the right orbit.
That already sounds less like “his eye got irritated” and more like “please don’t touch this guy and let him heal.”
Why people believed it was “nothing serious”
Because a week before these results were published, White was saying something along the lines of: there’s no serious damage, the retina is fine, he’ll recover — and we’ll book the rematch.
But reality turned out to be different. And, more importantly, it turned out to involve surgery.
Surgeries and a layoff: this isn’t “rest,” it’s treatment
Aspinall said he had his first surgery on December 29.
And this wasn’t “they gave him drops and sent him home”: the plan includes another surgery — on the other eye (he mentioned mid-January).
His stance, by the way, is as grown-up as it gets: no “hurry up, I have to prove it.” He says outright that he won’t rush and risk his eyesight just to satisfy other people’s talk.
And that’s when it becomes clear why the heavyweight division is quiet again: the champion simply doesn’t have medical clearance.
And yes, Aspinall snapped at Gane for the first time
Tom is usually pretty calm, but this time he publicly went at Ciryl hard: like, what rematch dates are you talking about if I have no clearance and I’m dealing with surgeries — and all of this after your foul (he mentioned fingernails, and called him a cheat).
This is important in terms of tone: he’s no longer playing the “nothing personal” game. He’s genuinely upset that the whole thing has turned into a “faker/not a faker” debate while he’s going from doctor to doctor.
How serious could it be?
Recovery timelines for injuries like this can vary widely: from a couple of months to half a year and longer, especially if muscles are involved and multiple procedures are needed.
And Joe Rogan even voiced the bleakest scenario: that with vision issues there’s a risk of never coming back at all — the eye is a delicate, unpredictable thing. And yes, he brought up Bisping as the exception, not the norm: he really did fight while blind in one eye, but that’s more “psychopathic levels of toughness” than a model to follow.
Logic suggests two options:
- Wait — but the UFC heavyweight division doesn’t like pauses. It stagnates instantly.
- An interim title — and that’s already being talked about: Alexander Volkov’s team, for example, wants an interim fight with Gane.
And here the UFC will have to choose between sporting integrity and business reality. Because keeping the belt “locked up” with no clear timeline is a risk — but not giving the champion time to recover also looks bad.
My takeaway is simple
It looks like we turned the situation into the meme “he just didn’t want to continue” too quickly — and it turned out to be a medical story involving surgeries and uncertainty.
And this is the kind of case where it’s better to be boring and cautious than heroic and blind. Even if some people on the internet want him to “prove it.”
