Tom Aspinall wasn’t just sitting idly by for a year waiting for a Jon Jones fight to materialize. In a new interview with TNT Sports, the UFC heavyweight champion revealed that he’d been given multiple dates to fight Jones and spent significant time in training camp preparing before the bout would get delayed.
“There were a lot of times where the UFC told me, ‘Right, the Jon Jones fight is happening in three months,’ for example,” Aspinall said. “So we’d start the training camp, the intensity would
go up. Then the date would get moved. And that happened about three or four times, until he retired.”
“So it wasn’t like I was literally sat waiting the full year. I did think the fight was gonna come. And then everyone’s saying, ‘Oh why you waiting?’ I wasn’t waiting, I was getting told that the fight was happening. So there was nothing I could really do, my hands were tied completely by the UFC.”
That sounds incredibly frustrating, but Aspinall prefers to look at the upside.
“It is [more mentally taxing],” he admitted. “But what it’s given me, is it’s given me a massive opportunity to get better. Because I’m not just training without a goal. I did have a massive goal that I was working towards. And it didn’t materialize. So I did have the intensity of a training camp, I did have the hard sparring, the hard rounds in the gym, the hard grapples, the strength and conditioning work and things you do for a training camp. So my improvement in the last year has been massive. And I just can’t wait to show it.”
Aspinall will fight Ciryl Gane in the main event of UFC 321 on October 25th from Abu Dhabi, UAE. A lot of people have suggested he’ll have a mountain of pressure on his shoulders to win after Jon Jones questioned his worthiness endlessly over the past two years. But Tom isn’t bothered.
“There’s certain types of people, not just athletes, where pressure wears them down,” he said simply. “And there’s those that shine under pressure, and I am 100% part of the latter.”
