UFC Fighter Justine Kish Defecates in Ring, Gets a Thumbs-Up from Fans, Other Athletes

ByElizabeth Licata

Professional sports are intense. During a UFC fight on Saturday in Oklahoma, professional MMA fighter Justine Kish struggled so hard to get out of a submission hold that she accidentally defecated on the mat, right in the middle of the ring. Now she’s getting attention from far outside the fighting circuit, but surprisingly enough, most of that attention seems to be positive.

According to the New York Daily News, it was a pretty tough match.  Kish had her UFC debut this year and had competed in six fights and won all of them, so she was on one hell of a winning streak. Saturday she was fighting Felice Herring, who is the #9 ranked female MMA fighter in their weight class. So this was going to be one hell of a fight.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exkoItYnk9k]

In the third round, Herring got Kish in a submission hold. It was a really good hold, and many fighters would have given up and tapped out, but Kish kept straining against it. She was trying to “explode” out of the hold when, well, it happened, and the accident went unnoticed at first–by everyone except Kish and Herring–until the mess on the mat became visible and everyone could see what had happened.

That has to be a hugely embarrassing experience, but Kish earned herself a ton of new fans by posting a tweet about it after the match. and hashtagging it #ShitHappens.

This could have been extremely embarrassing, but people seem to love Kish’s sense of humor, and also the fact that this happened because she was struggling so hard and was unwilling to tap out. Her fans seem to be taking it as a sign of heart.

Also, this is not even the first time this has happened. At least two other UFC fighters have defecated in the middle of a fight. Mixed martial arts are just that strenuous of a sport.

Some fans took to Twitter to ask MMA referee John McCarthy how this sort of thing is handled from a scoring perspective, and he said that defecating or urinating in the ring ends the match.

“The fight’s over. You cannot expect a fighter to compete with someone who has fecal matter on them. There is no timeout or cleanup,” he wrote. For scoring terms, it is counted as a TKO loss for whichever fighter had the accident.

This fight may have ended Kish’s six-fight winning streak, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt her standing with her fans at all.

(Image: Screenshot / YouTube)

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