Renato Moicano has released another statement following his controversial loss to Tom Nolan at last night’s UFC Halloween event at the Meta Apex.
Moicano was doing a good job of getting Nolan down to the canvas and taking his back, getting a body triangle in the second round. But “Money” wasn’t active enough from that position for referee Dan Miragliotta’s liking, and the fight was stood up. Moicano took a big knee from Nolan and was subsequently finished early in the third round (watch the highlights here).
A lot of fans and fighters have been raging about Miragliotta’s stand-up, but Moicano has refused to make that the focus following his loss. A shorter statement has now been followed by a longer video from the Brazilian fighter where he used the situation as a teaching moment.
“I’m not too badly hurt,” Moicano reported in Portuguese. “Although I have some scrapes on my face, there weren’t any cuts. I went to the hospital and everything is fine, so I want to reassure everyone.”
“Things don’t always go the way we want,” he said regarding the bogus stand-up. “And what am I going to do? Am I going to rebel against the world? Am I going to curse the referee? Am I going to start a war? I want to congratulate Tom Nolan and say that he’s not responsible for anything. He went there and did a much better job than me standing up, and I think I’m better on the ground than him, but I also couldn’t effectively land attacks, I couldn’t land strikes.”
“What I want to talk about here more than that is, now what?” Moicano continued. “I lost, and now what? Has the world ended? What now? Where do I go? Now my career is going to be a mess, I lost to a guy who’s bad, I still think he’s bad. But so what? What can I do? Do you understand? It’s a complicated situation.”
“There will be other fights, I will improve,” he declared. “The context of this whole video is to tell you one thing: it is about winning or improving. I have a lot to improve. You can get wherever you want, just like I want to overcome this defeat later on. I will overcome this defeat. I will find a way to improve.”
“Watch this video and apply it to something in your life. Sometimes not everything is in your control, but it doesn’t matter. Give thanks, thank God every day. And know that’s how sports are, man: one wins, another loses. One cries, the other laughs.”
Some powerful words from Moicano, who is now 1-4 over his last four. That being said, even though he’s not angry about the stand-up that could have cost him his win, that was still some No. 1 bulls–t.
