Tatiana Suarez did not have a great birthday in 2023.
The TUF 23 winner and top UFC strawweight contender suffered a knee injury while training on her 33rd birthday this past December. Suarez was slated to face Amanda Lemos in a pivotal bout on Feb. 17 at UFC 298, but her initial diagnosis was an optimistic one — she expected to be healed enough by fight night to compete in what was ostensibly her final test before a shot at the UFC strawweight title.
Unfortunately, however, her knee had other ideas.
“The inflammation just never went down,” Suarez revealed Wednesday on The MMA Hour. “I had to have my knee drained and there was like 400 [cubic centimeters] of fluid inside my knee, and you’re only supposed to have like three [cubic centimeters] of fluid. So it was quite a bit. And they had given me some stem cells and my knee reacted badly to the stem cells, so then that took some more time. And then I just wasn’t able to train, like, at all.
“I couldn’t grapple, I couldn’t wrestle. Usually if I could do one aspect of the sport hard, whether it’s just striking or wrestling or jiu-jitsu, I’ll just fight. Like, I fought [Alexa] Grasso, my back was bad — I fought her regardless. I couldn’t wrestle and I couldn’t strike, but I could roll hard, so all I did my entire camp was I just rolled really hard, and I ended up winning via rear-naked choke. So I’m not a stranger to fighting through injuries and stuff like that. But when I can’t train at all and go hard, then I just won’t go through it.”
Suarez ultimately withdrew from the contest earlier this month. In her stead, Mackenzie Dern is now set to take on Lemos as the preliminary card headliner of UFC 298.
Suarez (10-0) is widely considered to be one of the most talented female fighters in the world. The former Olympic wrestling hopeful is MMA Fighting’s No. 2 ranked strawweight, however repeated injuries have hindered her UFC career, limiting her to just seven bouts since making her promotional debut in 2016. Most notably, Suarez’s career hit a screeching halt from June 2019 to February 2023 due to a near four-year injury layoff, however she was able to reclaim some of her momentum in 2023 with back-to-back submission wins over Montana De La Rosa and Jessica Andrade. It was just the second time in her UFC run that Suarez was able to compete more than once in a calendar year.
Following her latest hurdle, Suarez said she consulted with medical professionals at the UFC Performance Institute and they agreed with her decision to not compete.
“The good thing is that there’s nothing actually anatomically wrong with my knee,” Suarez said. “So that’s a good thing. But I just didn’t want to go ahead and try to push through something that wasn’t doing what it [was supposed to], because my knee was really inflamed and I didn’t want to try to grapple through something and then actually hurt my knee badly. Because it is the knee that I had surgery on, so I just didn’t want to go ahead and mess with that, especially because my actual injury was so severe. I mean, I tore every ligament in my knee.
“I have cadavers, they’re not my actual ligaments, so I didn’t want to do something kind of similar to the Nina Ansaroff thing where I pushed through the injury, I went and fought, and then it got worse in the fight, and then I had to be out for a couple years. I just didn’t want that to happen to me again. I learned my lesson the first time and I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ But if it was something where I could train and just go hard, I would have just fought with it. But it just wasn’t working out for me. We tried everything.”
The timing is even more unfortunate considering an HBO Sports documentary chronicling the adversity she has overcome in her athletic career, The Unbreakable Tatiana Suarez, releases this week on streaming service Max. But as always, Suarez is not deterred.
She expects to be able to resume her chase of the UFC strawweight title soon.
“I’m training, I’m just not going live yet, so I think I should be able to go live within a few more weeks,” Suarez said. “It’s just literally still inflamed, so it doesn’t bend all the way. I tried to do jiu-jitsu drills yesterday and it was being weird, I felt like I was 10,000 years old. I’m like, ‘OK, maybe it just needs another week or two.’ But I don’t think it should be that much longer, so we’re going to continue training.”
