Coronavirus' Impact on MMAThe last four months represent a tumultuous time in the career of One Championship’s Bi Nguyen. She was on the wrong side of a unanimous decision against former two-sport champion Nong Stamp in November, and she was removed from her follow-up fight in February due to injury. The promotion quickly rebooked Nguyen in a muay Thai bout the following month, only to have it fall victim to one of many postponements resulting from the coronavirus outbreak. However, her frustrations did not end there, as she revealed another opportunity fell through mere hours after it was made.
“As we’re contracted each fight, if we don’t have a fight, we don’t make money, so it was rough for me to spend money to be in Thailand [to train],” Nguyen told Sherdog.com. “Obviously, the injury was really sad. One [Championship is] really good, so they rebooked me right away. Then that was cancelled. They are the first promotion to ever have the closed-door event. They did that for the [‘King of the Jungle’ show], so they wanted to do it again. Most people don’t know this, but I was in Vietnam doing some commercial work [and] my bout got rescheduled to Singapore for a closed-door event April 12. It was booked [and] I was high-fiving the film crew and everybody. Two hours later, we got the text that Singapore had closed the borders to all Asian countries.”
In this exclusive interview with Sherdog, Nguyen discussed the financial difficulty associated with the current health crisis, how the Asian nations she visited tried to proactively combat the pandemic and the reality of returning home to quarantine.
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