Faber Pulls Out Of WEC 50 With Knee Injury, Talks To Heavy.com

A knee injury has forced former WEC featherweight weight champion Urijah Faber to pull out of his scheduled fight with Takeya Mizugaki at WEC 50 next month.

HeavyMMA.com was informed of the injury by sources close to the fighter on Thursday evening. Faber confirmed the news via his Twitter account on Friday morning.

“Somebody was going to take me down during training. They swept me and I heard a loud pop,” Faber told Heavy on Friday morning. “They said it would be six weeks before I could train again, but it may heal even faster.

Faber is officially calling it a lower-body injury, but didn’t want to specify the exact nature. He tells Heavy.com that training was going well and he wasn’t experiencing any lasting effects from the Jose Aldo leg kicks he took during his last fight.

“It was good. I changed my eating habits over the past seven years because I was trying to gain weight. I just ate really healthy and focused on my diet,” Faber said. “I was down to 148 pounds or 153 pounds, depending on the time of day you caught me at. I never really run a lot because I’m trying to keep weight on, but I was incorporating that this time around. I felt great.”

“It’s completely unrelated to the Aldo fight,” Faber continued. “It really was a very specific thing that was done to my leg. The guy that hooked me was 170 pounds and it was just a very specific motion. I’d been training for over a month at full strength, so it definitely didn’t have anything to do with the Aldo fight.”

Faber was scheduled to make his bantamweight debut on the show against Mizugazki. WEC officials told HeavyMMA.com that Mizugaki will no longer participate on the card.