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Nick Diaz’s ‘retirement’ speech. I give it 4 months.

Heavy’s UFC 143 Gallery is up!

And so is Esther Lin’s UFC 143 Gallery as well. This is Dustin Poirier loosening up his opponent’s arm ligaments en route to a Sub of the Night award.

Renan Barao reveals that his fight with Spot Jorgenson almost didn’t happen:

“Actually, I got sick twice. At first I had a problem in the throat, with fever and I went to Rio de Janeiro train. Missing 15 days to fight again had the same problem in the throat, and Dede (Pederneiras) told me that if I did not train well next week, would be better to cancel the fight, and leave for later. But I wanted to fight anyway, and thankfully it worked.”

Beating Jorgenson is impressive all on it’s own, let alone after a training camp screwed up by sickness.

MMA Fighting has a collection of fighter reactions from the Condit / Diaz match. Based on media reaction you can put most of them into the ‘idiots that don’t understand the sport’ pile because the majority thought Diaz won that fight.

The slap.

Gifs are up at Iron Forges Iron!

Here’s hoping the UFC manages to get some of these amazing highlights onto sports shows around the world. Every event is a goldmine of martial arts bad-assery.

It’s gonna be hard for any website to top this headline.

Bloody Elbow gets us the scorecard. For ye sad souls with impaired vision, here’s the scores written out:

• Judge Cecil Peoples had it: 10-9, 10-9, 9-10, 10-9, 10-9 for Condit.
• Judge Patricia Morse Jarman had it: 10-9, 10-9, 9-10, 10-9, 10-9 for Condit.
• Judge Junichiro Kamijo had it 10-9, 9-10, 10-9, 10-9, 9-10 for Condit.

Key stats takeaway from this fight from Josh Gross:

Per @Compustrike: Condit outlanded Diaz 146-110. Diaz 86 arm strikes to Condit’s 42. Condit’s 104 kicks to Diaz’s 19.

Remember when Carlos Condit’s camp said they’d be interested in fighting again before the GSP match in the fall? Well, how about a rematch against Nick Diaz? ESPN’s Brett Okamoto gets Lorenzo Fertitta’s thoughts:

Just spoke to @lorenzofertitta. He said @CarlosCondit has definitely earned title shot/right to wait for GSP. No rematch. @lorenzofertitta told me GSP was upset and wanted him to make rematch but he said, “I can’t do that to Carlos.”

They already screwed him once when they traded him out of the GSP title fight. Making him fight Nick Diaz AGAIN? Man. It’s justifiable in the sense that it was a controversial decision in an extremely close fight, but it just seems wrong considering everything.

Dana White just said that Anderson Silva vs Chael Sonnen 2 has been verbally agreed to for June. Chael will finally head down to Brazil to have his steak medium rare.

Here’s Fightmetric’s raw breakdown of the strikes situation.