Fabricio Werdum & His Team Suffer Carbon Monoxide Poisoning In Mexico

Fabricio Werdum won four straight bouts to earn a title shot at returning champion Cain Velasquez in the main event of November 15’s UFC 180 pay-per-view (PPV) from Mexico City, Mexico, but he also nearly died before it happened.

Heading South of the Border in preparation for his stint as a coach opposite Velasquez on the inaugural season of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) Latin America, Werdum moved himself and his training staff into a house in Mexico without looking at it first.

When they did, they realized that it didn’t have power, so they had to have separate generators set up. When they did, a scary scene ensued for Werdum and his friends. He detailed the close call to MMA Fighting, noting they were extremely sick and even close to death:

“It was terrible. We came to Nevado de Toluca to train, and we didn’t see the house before renting it. There was no power, nothing, and it was really cold there. I was there with 12 other guys from my team, and they got us a gasoline generator to get power. They usually left the generator outside the house, but put this one inside the house.

We were training inside the house, had dinner and went to bed. They didn’t tell us to turn that thing off before sleeping. I woke us in the middle of the night with a huge headache, nausea, and couldn’t get out of bed. Everyone was dizzy. My brother got out of his bed and managed to turn that thing off. We almost died from poisoning.

We went to the hospital, everybody throwing up and with diarrhea. The doctor said that we would have died in two hours if nobody had turned that thing off.”

Werdum and his crew were stricken with carbon monoxide poisoning from the generator, and could have easily died had they not received the medical attention that they did. They moved their training camp 60 miles away, and now the usually light-hearted Werdum can look back on the situation and laugh:

“What doesn’t kill make you stronger. That made me stronger. We’re fine now. That was a huge scare. We almost died. Imagine the headlines: ‘Werdum moves his camp to Mexico and dies with his whole team.’ We were searching for a breath of fresh air and almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning [laughs].”

Werdum is able to make light of the situation where he almost perished, and in a strange way, he now has nothing to lose. He’ll have to fight like it when he squares off in the biggest bout of the life versus the grinding Velasquez, who may be the best heavyweight in UFC history.

Will “Vai Cavalo” throw caution to the wind and score another huge upset?