Miesha Tate is on the mend after contracting COVID and is narrowing down an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) return date for her fight with Ketlen Vieira.
Former UFC Women’s Bantamweight champion Tate (19-7) was scheduled to fight Vieira in the main event of UFC Vegas 40 on Sat., Oct. 16 via ESPN+. “Cupcake” was pulled from the fight earlier this month after testing positive for COVID-19. Tate, one half of SiriusXM’s Throwing Down w/ Renee and Miesha, gives an update on her health and next fight.
“It’s still clearing out of my lungs just a little bit, like when I wake up in the morning,” Tate tells SB Nation’s Combat Culture and MMAMania.com about her COVID recovery. “You can hear it a little bit, probably, in my sinuses still. I still have a little bit of a cough, but it’s getting better every day. I had a really tough strength and conditioning workout today and I feel like I crushed it, so the limitations are getting much less. I think it’s just a matter of continuing to work through it and progress. Hopefully, this will get rescheduled before too long. Essentially, it cost me two weeks of camp. I was pretty sick. Nothing alarming. A little bit of a fever. I had a pretty severe cough. I had sinus congestion. I wasn’t sleeping well at night. Taste and smell got weird, it was kind of muted. But the next week my kids were sick. So I couldn’t get really even get to the gym to train, I couldn’t hire a sitter, I couldn’t have anybody come here, I couldn’t take them out, I couldn’t take them with me.
“So it’s like two weeks, and even that week was pretty rough as far as trying to get my body back into the swing of things. That definitely was nowhere near 100 percent. I tried really hard to talk myself into keeping the fight on Oct. 16, but the reality was I just wasn’t going to be on par to be at that 100 percent mark and I have to be. That was a choice to delay.”
Tate (No. 8) is still eager to fight Vieira (No. 7) and hopes to reschedule the fight for either UFC 268 on Nov. 6 or one of the two UFC Fight Night events on Nov. 13 and Nov. 20.
“I’m hoping in November,” she says of her next fight. “Anytime before Thanksgiving really. Maybe right before. I have mommy duties now so I’ve got the kids and it’s a different dynamic, so it’s kind of wearing of the hats. I really wanted to get a fight in before the holidays started.”
Tate is performing a delicate balancing act of duties: competing as an active UFC fighter, raising two young children, and co-hosting SiriusXM’s new weekly program Throwing Down w/ Renee and Miesha.
“Honestly, I’m pretty tapped out for anything else I can manage,” she confesses. “At this point, I’m outsourcing. I’m looking for help, personal assistants, I’m leaning more on my family, my fiancee, Johnny [Nunez]. ‘Here, take the kids, they’re not my problem for the next three hours cause I’ll be on the radio, peace!’”
Tate made a successful Octagon return in July, beating Marion Reneau via third-round technical knockout (TKO) (watch here) following a nearly five-year layoff.
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