Aiemann Zahabi’s weight cut was all but done before the news that his UFC 315 bout with Jose Aldo was no longer happening at bantamweight.
During Friday’s UFC 315 official weigh-ins, it was revealed that Aldo vs. Zahabi would be moved to featherweight. Multiple people with knowledge of the promotion’s plans confirmed to MMA Fighting that the bump-up in weight classes was because Aldo was told to stop cutting weight by the UFC doctor while being nine pounds over on Thursday night. The former featherweight champion looked depleted on the scale, but the fight will move forward.
Zahabi reacted to the change while speaking with UFC Canadian broadcast partner SportsNet, saying that he was less than a pound away from making the bantamweight limit when he got the news.
“So I was cutting my weight and I just got into the blankets this morning, and I was 136.8 pounds,” Zahabi said. “Firas [Zahabi] was receiving the text and the calls to stop cutting. ‘Jose can’t make weight, he’s 145. There’s no way he’s going to make the weight,’ and the commission won’t allow, in Montreal, a five-pound weight difference. So there’s no 20 percent, we have to do a featherweight fight. We can’t do a bantamweight fight. A bantamweight fight option is off the table completely.”
Zahabi also posted a video of him weighing in just under 137 pounds on Friday morning after receiving the news.
Here’s my weight when I was asked to stop cutting! https://t.co/fpMkkfL4rq pic.twitter.com/7xwgJuBkqR
— Aiemann Zahabi (@Aiemannzahabi) May 9, 2025
Because the fight was in jeopardy of being cancelled altogether, and due to the fight having to be contested at featherweight, the standard weight miss penalties wouldn’t apply. Zahabi reveals that his team needed to renegotiate the structure of his contract for the fight.
“So then we got to think, we got to renegotiate… [because] we could say no,” Zahabi said. “The fight’s off. Because of the five-pound difference, the fight’s off basically.
“So my brother told me, ‘What would X do?’ — Xavier Alaoui — ‘What would X do?’ He said, ‘He would renegotiate and take the fight.’ … So we renegotiated with Sean Shelby, and they gave me an offer that I accepted, and the fight’s on.”
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