UFC bails on Vancouver

The UFC is dead to Vancouver. Neil Davidson over at the Canadian Press is reporting that due to “insurance and other issues,” the promotion has scrapped plans to hold UFC 116 in the city on June 12 at GM place and is now looking at Cincinnati as a possible venue.

Seems the UFC just got sick of waiting for officials in Vancouver to get their shit together and pulled the plug.

This comes after word surfaced of a discord between the pro-MMA Vancouver Athletic Commission and the city council, which is a mixed bag of supporters and haters with their heads up their asses. According to the Vancouver Sun’s Chris Parry, here are the issues the city council hold-outs have:

First, the city is concerned that a fighter waiver might not be enough to prevent the city from being sued by an injured fighter and so the venue must indemnify the city from any future legal actions. Since all city venues with the exception of BC Place and GM Place are city-owned, that would mean the city has to indemnify the city against itself [for events not held in either of those two locations] – a gordian knot of big enough proportions to have thus far kept the city’s legal team from reaching any decisions. It should also be noted that nobody has ever, in the history of MMA, boxing and associated sports, sued a city for allowing them to take part in a regulated fight, especially after they’ve signed a waiver beforehand. But even if it were a valid issue, surely hockey and boxing would be in the same boat MMA is.

The second issue was [councilor Raymond] Louie’s demand that promoters insure their events for $12 million. That would be six times what a 14,000-seat arena MMA event in Florida needs to be insured for, and would cost smaller promoters so much as to make Vancouver-based MMA events unprofitable no matter how many seats were sold.

In addition to his amendments, Louie is reportedly putting hurdles in place of regulated MMA at the arena end. Numerous promoters, including the Maximum Fighting Championships boss Mark Pavelich from Edmonton, have told me that all discussions they’ve had with the PNE for the purpose of renting city-owned facilities have ground to a halt because, and I quote Pavelich here, “the councilor who runs the PNE board said he won’t allow it.”

Pavelich is fuming, demanding to know why he can’t negotiate a price for use of a public building that, frankly, sits empty more often than not, and would bring tax dollars and arena rental dollars to the city – especially since the by-law that allowed regulation of MMA specifically mentioned that the use of public facilities was welcomed.

Clusterfuck is the best way to describe the situation. Political stupidity is another.The UFC is a business and it has no problem taking its business elsewhere, like back to the United States.

It also sends a horrible message to anyone in Ontario who hopes to see MMA sanctioned there. Now politicians in that province can point across the praires to BC and say, “Look, if laid back, forward-thinking, herb-happy Vancouver thinks MMA is a bad idea then why the hell would we want it in our own backyard?”