Fernand Lopez: "Cyril Gane has been training like crazy, the best is yet to come"

Cyril Gane's head coach, Fernand Lopez, had an interview today addressing a bunch of stuff, also trying to clarify what happened with Cyril the past year. It's in French so there won't be articles about it for a bit. Link to interview. What he said: For Cyril the best is yet to come, he still has potential for growth, and relatively young for HW. In HW, the level gaps between the top 10 and top 5, and between the top 5 and top 2, are extremely wide. Since Jon Jones fight, Cyril has been training like crazy to get to to this top level. Coach feels he's halfway there, pretty close. Gane's mindset has changed a lot since Jones fight, you can feel it in sparring. Obviously he regrets showing Gane relaxing playing FIFA because they trained hard and that's the only thing people remember. Regarding the break he took for the Netflix show he's acting in: UFC was 100% ok with it, Gane's team already told them in advance about not being available middle of the year. The plan was to fight Pavlovich in the first half of 2024, but the Pavlovich declined in the end. They were also asking for Aspinall at the same time, which believed he could get Jon Jones, so he refused too. Even if UFC accepted the break, they still asked Cyril if he could fight Aspinall at ufc 304 (July '24) Lopez and Gane were ok with it, but Netflix production wasn't. Hunter had dinner with Netflix CEO to talk about moving the TV show dates to accommodate the fight. Because it was too costly to move filming dates, Netflix ended up saying no. Gane had a whole gym still during production, continued training. They understand that fans might be upset about the TV show break, but it made sense from a career perspective. No bad blood with Hunter or UFC since it wasn't their fault. submitted by /u/baaguetto [link] [comments]