Affliction on the Ropes?
Affliction, an impressive fight organization competing against the UFC, has had a major force in its corner: Fedor Emelianenko. Fedor has seemed unstoppable in year of fighting against the best in the world (30 wins with only one loss back in 2000.)
But other organizations have also based perhaps too much of their success on a single name: Notably Elite XC, and their reliance on Kimbo Slice to draw in dollars and viewers. When Kimbo slighted to prove to be less than the unstoppable force he was touted as, the foundation of Elite XC quickly crumbled.
Fortunately for Affliction, their are no such breaks in the armor of the impressive, and well loved Russian. But the problem with an impressive fighter is that he’s only impressive if you have someone equally amazing for him to fight. Affliction has been able to pull this off this far with fighters like Tim Sylvia and Andre Arlovski.
But this week they ran into some serious troubles.
Affliction “Trilogy” was scheduled to air on August 1st. Josh Barnett was scheduled to slug it out with Fedor. Josh is in extremely impressive fighter and a lot of folks were eager to watch this fight. Unfortunately, Josh tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid on Wednesday.
Josh was quick to respond through his blog on Thursday, letting his fans know that he was as surprised as they were (You can read Josh’s comments on the situation here.)
Affliction continued to try to find a suitable opponent for Fedor, apparently reaching out to long time fighter Vitor Belfort (which, in my mind is really just laughable.) But as of this morning, they have opted to cancel the event instead.
This is not the sort of thing you tend to see an organization come back from.
Obviously there is good and bad to Affliction failing… less competition, more control for the UFC, less power for the fighters, more for the organization. But I say that anything that finally puts Couture, Lesnar, and Fedor all in the same ring isn’t entirely bad 
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