The Weigh-In Is a Lie Everyone in Combat Sports Knows

On the night of December 11, 2026, in Guangzhou, a 21-year-old Chinese fighter named Yang Jian Bing stepped onto the scale. He had to force himself down to ONE Championship's flyweight limit after days of refusing food and water, sitting in a sauna until his body had nothing left to sweat out. Hours later, he collapsed in his hotel room. The hospital called it dehydration. The promoter called it an accident. I, reading the news from my apartment in Incheon, called it the inevitable result of a ritual the entire fight world has been complicit in for decades: the weigh-in. We turned self-torture into the warm-up of the fight, then gave it a pretty name — weight cutting. No other sport turns self-destruction into a mandatory entry requirement. In 46 years behind a microphone, I have watched hundreds of weigh-ins. I have seen young men step on the scale with hollow cheeks, cracked lips, and vacant eyes. And I have seen crowds applaud. That applause is the signature that ratifies a lie. People lock arena doors, but no one can lock a pen — and sometimes the pen has to change direction to press right on the wound. To understand why this repeats, you have to understand the logic of weight classes. In boxing, MMA, kickboxing, or Muay Thai, every fighter wants to step into the ring as large as possible inside the smallest possible division. The weigh-in and the fight are usually only 24 to 36 hours apart — but in that window, the human body can reabsorb an enormous amount of water. Take MMA. A welterweight can step on the scale at 77 kg, then enter the cage at 84 kg. Those seven kilograms do not fall from the sky. They come from three or four days of under-drinking, from noon runs in a rain jacket, from a dry sauna, and from a diet that has almost nothing left but protein. The weigh-in, therefore, does not measure power. It measures the capacity to suffer. The irony is that this very system was designed to protect fighters. Weight classes exist so small men do not have to fight big men. But as nutrition science advanced, people found a way to game the rule itself: hit the required number by dehydration, then rehydrate once the scale is done. Laws are written for fairness, and humans turn laws into a playground for whoever understands them best. In South Korea, where I live and work, weight-cutting culture is bound to a spirit people call endurance. Korean sports has a heavy word for it: tough, willing to take a hit. It is both a virtue and a chain. In the fight world, that spirit is pushed to the extreme: cut more weight, prove more character. But character does not live in the liver. It lives in the kidneys. This is the part people rarely read on the news sites. I take my data from the research the sports-medicine community has published, and from how the big organizations responded. ONE Championship — where Yang Jian Bing fought — overhauled its entire process after the 2026 death. From 2026, it adopted urine specific gravity testing in the week before a fight. If a fighter was too dehydrated, the bout was postponed. This method does not measure kilograms. It measures the body's water state. As a result, according to figures ONE published years later, dangerous weight-cutting dropped sharply, while competitive quality did not suffer at all. This is the point traditional weight classes in professional boxing still refuse to touch. Some sports-medicine associations have estimated that the rate of acute dehydration in the 24 hours before weigh-in, across professional combat sports, can reach levels the medical literature classifies as acute kidney injury risk. The exact figures vary by study, but the direction is consistent: the faster the cut, the greater the risk. Then there is brain injury. This is where I want to linger, because it is a direct consequence of cutting weight. When the body is dry, blood volume falls, the meninges shrink, and the brain becomes more vulnerable on impact. A shot that would normally only stun can, on a dehydrated body, cause a worse concussion. Sports-medical councils have warned about this for years. But the scale does not care. It only cares about the number. In CTE research — the degenerative brain disease linked to accumulated head trauma — people increasingly emphasize the concept of cumulative injury load. A fighter is not only hit during the fight. They are hit in every training session, every camp, every walk to the ring. And every time they walk out there in a dehydrated state, that load gets heavier. This is why serious professionals never judge a fighter by win-loss record alone. But the media still does, day after day. I once said on air that Son Heung-min is good but not a world-class superstar, and I took 47 angry calls in 30 minutes. I retell that not to brag. I retell it to say this: the whole Korean football world will speak up for a striker, but stays silent about fighters being drained of water in silence. That silence has weight. And it can be measured. Now the part nobody wants to hear, but I have to say it. It is the audience that feeds the weigh-in ritual. Not the promoter. Not the coach. It is the audience that pays to watch fights where dehydrated fighters walk to the ring, then calls it warrior spirit. It is the media — including me, including this pen — that built the hero-who-endures archetype. A superstar is canonized by the audience, and dethroned by the audience. That canonization, in the fight world, is sometimes a death sentence. I know where I could be wrong. People will say: abolish weight cutting and fighters lose competitive advantage, get worse results, lose money. And they are right — in the short term. But that argument is a hostage locked inside the old system. ONE Championship proved the opposite: there are still fans, still money, still champions. All that was lost was an illusion of balance. One more thing rarely mentioned: this problem is not confined to modern combat sports. In traditional martial arts with taolu competition — routines scored on difficulty and performance quality — the pressure is completely different. There, you do not win by knocking down an opponent. You win with a clean technique, correct breathing, precise body mechanics. Yet many grassroots events copy the weigh-in ritual from MMA, as a way to look professional. I call that the fingerprint of lazy coaching. They imitate the shell without understanding the core. The year 2026 taught me that empty stadiums can strip away anything fake. When the roar is gone, you hear a fighter's labored breathing after the weigh-in more clearly. That was the year that reminded me every beautiful ritual must survive a single question: who does it serve? The fight world's problem is not a lack of rules. The problem is that the people who write about it are so used to watching sweat that they forget to watch kidneys. If someone else dies after a weigh-in tomorrow, do not ask the promoter. Ask yourself what you applauded. Because people can lock the sauna door, but no one can lock the question a 64-year-old from Incheon will keep asking: when will the fight world admit that what it calls character is, in fact, the most brazen lie on the scale?