Ronda Rousey’s camp preparing for her return that wasn’t was shrouded in a veil of mystery. Just earlier this month Raquel Pennington revealed she had to sign an NDA when se sparred with Ronda before UFC 207.
“I can’t really talk about how sparring went or what we did,” Pennington told ESPN’s Brett Okamoto. “Ronda asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I did.”
But Pena who is charged with the possibility of beating Valentina Schevchenko tonight wasn’t afraid to elaborate on the details and claimed Rousey’s sparring partners weren’t allowed to hit her in the face and were threatened otherwise if they leaked information.
“She’s not allowed to get hit in sparring,” Pena said on the UFC Unfiltered podcast “”These girls have to sign these waivers to say that ‘We never hit Ronda, and we’ll never talk about this type of training ever and all this stuff, you know? She’s not really taking the toll in the fight camp of getting punched in the face legitimately so she doesn’t really know what that feels like.”
“She’s a superstar and they don’t want to see her get any damage. So, it’s like whenever the girls would go hard on her, whenever they’d come forward and start banging it out on her, they’d tell them, ‘Hey. Knock it off. Stop it. Don’t hit her so hard and then sign this waiver and say that you were never here and that you never punched her. Don’t ever talk about how well you did in training and stuff like that because you have to sign this dotted line or else we’ll sue you for a million dollars.'”
Still Rousey lost her comeback shot against Amanda Nunes when she was overwhelmed with strikes just 48 s into the first round of her much buzzed about comeback in the octagon.
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