The saga of ‘Sea-Level Cain’, a cautionary tale for Saturday’s UFC Fight Night in Mexico City

Cain Velasquez arrived in Mexico City in early June 2015 as the UFC heavyweight champion. He would only later realize that he had arrived too late, having underestimated what the air at 7,350 feet above sea level could do to even a well-conditioned professional athlete. It didn’t take long for him to figure it out.

“The first practice,” Javier Mendez, Velasquez’s longtime coach, told Yahoo Sports this week, “was horrible, horrible. I remember Cain getting tired of hitting the pads within 30 seconds. I got tired of holding the pads. (UFC middleweight) Luke Rockhold couldn’t even last a round. I looked around and thought, ‘Oh no, we’re in trouble.'”

This is what you might call a cautionary tale. There’s a lesson there that the fighters at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night event at Arena CDMX in Mexico City should heed.

If they haven’t learned from the infamous example of “Sea-Level Cain,” it’s too late to do much about it now.

In many ways, the Mexico City environment is a force in itself. People talk about the thin air in Denver, but Mexico City is more than 2,000 feet higher, with notoriously bad air pollution. Warriors on those first two Mexico City maps later recalled looking around and seeing all their colleagues coughing and scratching their throats. Some initially thought there was a virus going around, but then realized that smog was likely the culprit.

The combination of altitude and pollution is “a real blow to the ego,” said MMA writer Fernanda Prates, who moved to Mexico City in 2020 and had to come to terms with the fact that even her regular runs were “slower and sadder,” with a noticeable increase in body aches.

Velasquez’s hard lesson came at UFC 188, the promotion’s second event in Mexico City. In the first event in Mexico City the year before, Fabricio Werdum defeated Mark Hunt to win the interim heavyweight title while Velasquez was recovering from a knee injury. Werdum had done his homework ahead of that fight, showing up two months early and setting up a training camp in the mountains, where he trained his body for even higher altitudes at around 12,000 feet.

“The hardest part about training at this altitude is adapting,” Werdum told UFC.com at the time. “The first two weeks I was here, it felt like I had never trained before. I was so tired.”

Velasquez took a different approach when it came time for the title unification match against Werdum. His regular coach Mendez tried to convince the champion to come at least a month before the match, but Velasquez resisted. He had been to Mexico City, he explained. He knew what the air was like. He could handle it.

“He finally agreed to go 10 days early,” Mendez said. “I thought, OK, 10 days? With his great cardio, he should be fine. Boy, was I wrong.”

The training sessions were a disaster, according to Mendez. Normally a cardio machine, Velasquez had been reduced to a panting mess. Velasquez’s game plan for the heavyweight title fight was initially to start fast and push the pace on the bigger, older Werdum. But less than a minute into the first round, Mendez saw that wasn’t going to work.

“When I saw, 30 seconds later, how hard he was breathing? And then I saw him hit Werdum and Werdum just took it?” Mendez said. “That’s when I thought, ‘Oh, sh*t.’ If you look at the fight, I kept trying to change the strategy, but nothing worked.”

The result was one of the worst performances of Velasquez’s career. He eventually fell to a guillotine choke submission in the third round, leaving Werdum with only the UFC heavyweight title that Velasquez had held on and off for the past five years. Velasquez would never regain it.

He also didn’t get much sympathy from fans or media, many of whom rolled their eyes at claims that the altitude was to blame for the loss. Thus was born the “Sea-Level Cain” meme, a sarcastic insistence that Velasquez would be unbeatable if he could fight every match at sea level.

Since that experience, Mendez advises his fighters not to accept any invitation to fight in Mexico City unless they have the time and resources to set up a training camp there at least a month in advance.

Of course, mountain training camps cost money. Werdum could afford it. He had been a regular headliner for years at that point, and he was fighting in the main event of a UFC pay-per-view with the heavyweight title on the line. The cost of the camp was an investment in his future, and one that paid off immediately.

But for fighters lower down the roster at a UFC Fight Night event, the payouts can be comparatively meager. It’s not uncommon to see these less experienced fighters competing on contracts that pay them $20,000 to show and another $20,000 to win. When you factor in taxes and the cuts taken by managers and coaches, the cost of a special training camp at high altitude can make the difference between making a profit on the fight and going into debt over it, even with a win.

It’s a lot to balance for fighters still early in their careers, who are often grateful for any chance to fight in the UFC. It’s also a major calculation even for more established fighters, like featherweight contender Brian Ortega, who takes on Yair Rodriguez in Saturday’s co-main event. A fight like this could determine whether he moves up or down in the division at 33 years old. And the details of the matchup itself are difficult enough without factoring in difficult environmental circumstances.

According to Mendez, it is vital here that fighters receive good guidance from the people around them. He still wishes he had pushed harder to get Velasquez to Mexico City sooner and learn from Werdum’s example.

“The promoter, their job is to worry about going out there and putting on a great show at all the different venues,” Mendez said. “The fighter, your job is the performance. It’s got to be all about winning.”