Injuries & suspensions

What this is and is not

Not a complete medical record. These are absences someone researched and could source, gathered for a study of whether time away costs a fighter anything (it does not — +0.02 Elo per fight across 1,985 layoffs). An injury that never cost a fighter a booking is not here, and neither is one nobody wrote about.

One episode, counted once. The corpus double-counts in two ways and both are reconciled here rather than concatenated. Anti-doping sanctions and researched absences live in separate tables, and 77 pairs describe the same episode from both sides — a ban and the absence it caused — so they are shown as one. A further 5sanctions were the same case filed twice under different references (Jon Jones' 2017 turinabol ban is also on file as its own metabolite) and are shown once. A genuine second violation still counts twice.

“Away” is the gap between bouts, not the length of the injury or ban. It is measured from the fight an absence began after to the fight they returned in, so it also counts everything else that kept them out. Josh Barnett tops the list at 13 years because his 2002 steroid ban was followed by most of a decade fighting outside the UFC — the ban itself ran months, and where a published length exists it is shown beside the gap.

Suspensions are broader than doping. A suspension with a testing body and a substance came from a published anti-doping announcement; one without came from research into an unexplained absence, and may be commission discipline, a licence issue or a promotional ban. Every episode links its source — follow it rather than taking the summary on trust.