It appears as though Marco “Machete” Viedas’ March 29 fight won’t happen thanks to the ACL injury that his opponent suffered in training last week.
Viedas said he received the news by text Monday morning in the middle of an intense training session at Parksville Taekwondo.
“It was definitely hard to take at first, I was pretty upset about it,” he said. “I’ve been working real hard to prepare for this fight so to hear that, just a week out of having the fight was tough. Injuries are part of the sport though and it’s unfortunate that something like this would happen to anyone so at the end of the day, I’m just happy to be healthy and I’ll just have to look forward to the next fight.”
Viedas will scale back his training slightly from now until the middle of April, reducing from three training sessions per day to catch a bit of a rest before his next fight, scheduled for the end of May at the River Rock Casino.
“There was a point where the training was starting to catch up to me a bit. I would be losing a bit of steam just from training three times a day so it’s a bit of a relief,” Viedas said.
“I’ll scale it back a bit until the middle part of April and then ramp it back up. Hopefully I’ll have regained some energy by then and can pick the pace back up.”
Viedas plans on working a little more on his wrestling and jiu jitsu at both Island Top Team and Impact MMA. Machete has had a lot of help from fellow MMA athlete Graham Spencer, who’s one of the top ranked lightweights (155lbs) in Canada and is on the comeback trail from an injury himself.
“He’s been huge in helping me develop my wrestling game. Graham trains down in Sacramento with Team Alpha Male and the guys he’s training with are NCAA wrestling champions, so he’s battling down there to keep up and then gets to drop the knowledge on me,” Machete said.
“It’s been great to have him help me out so much and I’m really happy with what I’ve been able to pick up, not only from him but from all my coaches and fighters I’ve been able to work with.”
Machete will fight back at the bantamweight class (135lbs) for his next fight and is looking forward to having his last fight before he’s able to have a fight with full MMA rules.
“Yeah, I’d be lying if that wasn’t one of the things that got to me with not being able to have this fight on the 29th. I was looking forward to it but I’ll just have to wait that extra bit so I’ll hopefully come out a little more fired up because of that,” Viedas said. “It will feel good once it happens but I can’t really worry about that too much now, it’s out of my hands.”