UFC White House is days away from becoming a reality, but several major concerns are expected to linger up until fight night.
UFC CEO Dana White has frequently expressed his reluctance to host events outdoors due to the numerous external factors that can affect a fighting show outside of an enclosed venue. However, White and company couldn’t refuse an offer from President Donald Trump to produce a historic UFC event at the White House, which goes down on the South Lawn this Sunday.
Construction is
in its final stages for the event and UFC Chief Content Officer Craig Borsari, a lead producer on Sunday’s show, spoke to reporters at Wednesday’s media day about possible issues with the weather and other logistical complications.
“We are now at a period of time where weather can get fairly predictable,” Borsari said. “When you’re 7-10 days out, you get a general sense of what’s ahead of you. Now, starting with Friday, we have a pretty good idea of what we might be facing. So I’m not checking weather apps, I’m getting reports from our meteorologist, who’s on sight, and now he’s at a point where he’s giving us hourly updates of what the weather looks like.”
Two obvious concerns raised by media, fighters, and fans alike are how the UFC plans to deal with the summer sun and heat, and the possibility of rain—or worse, a thunderstorm.
Borsari’s team has prepared for the worst.
“We have a custom cover for the canvas, so that’s going to protect us from any increased heat,” Borsari said. “Part of the reason why we picked an 8 p.m. start time was so that we could get some of the intense direct sunlight off of the canvas, so we feel confident that the heat of the canvas, we have plans to mitigate that. Moisture, precipitation, wind, those are other things that we’re planning for, but in terms of the actual canvas being warm, yeah, when you’re out in the sun, particularly this time of year, it gets hot very quickly.
“We’ll keep it covered, we’ll keep it cool, there also is a canopy overhead, which you’ve probably seen on this claw structure, but there’s a 100-foot canopy or tarp over that that also provides a lot of shade and reduces the heat quite a bit.”
“If we have light to moderate rain with no lightning, we’re going to try to push forward,” Borsari later added. “That canopy will help, it’s more floor seating maybe a couple of rows up, the bleacher packs, there are people that will get wet, and to be honest, it’s so high up that if we’ve got a bit of a breeze, the rain will start to creep inside that 100-foot diameter.”
For now, all systems are go with the expectation that Trump and a number of high-ranking officials and VIP guests will be seated on the South Lawn for the show. The nearby Ellipse park hosts a viewing party with 80,000-plus fans planned to be in attendance.
In the worst-case weather scenario, Borsari has his team ready to act fast and improvise.
“So we have a few options,” Borsari said. “One is to stay on air and we do have contingency planning where we can remain and continue to broadcast from a location close by the South Lawn, and if we feel like a weather pattern’s coming in that will pass through and we can resume, we will. So we would not leave the broadcast, we would just fill and report from site.
“It’s a bit of an evaluation, so when we’re going through that we’ll be talking regularly to a meteorologist, who is right now on site giving us updates. We’ll figure out what does this window look like? Do we have the ability to resume or what is the extent of the weather front that’s coming through.”
With all of White’s biggest nightmare scenarios potentially in play, was there any thought to abandoning the White House project altogether?
“No, we never contemplated going indoors or in a different venue,” Borsari said.
