UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall revealed details of his painful recovery after the no-contest with Ciryl Gane at UFC 321, describing the surgeries as the most difficult surgical procedures of his life.
UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall underwent three eye surgeries after his fight with Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 in October 2025 was stopped due to multiple eye pokes and ruled a no-contest. In an interview on the podcast Great Company With Jamie Lang, Aspinall described the recovery as the toughest surgical experience he has ever gone through, and revealed that in the first few weeks he feared whether he would regain his sight at all.
Aspinall explained that one surgery was performed on his left eye and two on his right. What made the procedures particularly difficult was the fact that he remained awake during each of them. Medical staff used devices to keep his eye open, and the eye was numbed beforehand with drops and an injection to the side. Despite that, Aspinall said he could see instruments approaching and watched the entire procedure while they operated on his eye. He described the surgeries as horrendous, adding that they were worse than any other surgical experience in his life.
To convey the severity of the procedures, Aspinall drew an unusual comparison. He had previously thought a vasectomy would be the toughest surgery he would undergo, but the eye surgeries completely changed that. According to him, the vasectomy was nothing compared to what he went through on the operating tables. The hardest part was the first two weeks after the injury at UFC 321, when, as he put it, he was 'super scared' for his own vision. That private uncertainty played out against a backdrop of public criticism that did not work in his favor.
Alongside his recovery, Aspinall witnessed reactions from some fans who claimed he used the situation to avoid continuing the fight or simply didn't want to carry on. According to him, these experiences taught him a bitter lesson about the nature of professional combat sports. He said that in the eyes of many people, fighters are Saturday night entertainment, and fans who paid for a ticket can become hostile toward a fighter unable to continue a match, regardless of the reason. He added that he can't expect millions of people to care about him personally, but he also pointed out that many who pass judgment on the endurance of professional MMA fighters have never been inside the Octagon themselves.
The context of Aspinall's champion status is important for understanding the gravity of the situation. He won the interim heavyweight title in November 2023 at UFC 295, knocking out Sergei Pavlovich in just 69 seconds. In July 2024 at UFC 304, he defended that interim belt by stopping Curtis Blaydes in one minute. He became the undisputed champion roughly eleven months later, when Jon Jones informed the UFC of his retirement. The fight with Gane was supposed to be his first defense of the undisputed title, but instead of triumph, it brought three surgeries and weeks of fear for his eyesight.
Aspinall has not announced his next fight at the time of this writing, and details of his return to the Octagon have not been confirmed. What is clear from his statements is that the surgical recovery was longer and more painful than the public assumed when looking at the UFC 321 result that read 'no-contest'. The British champion made it clear that the injury was a serious medical situation, not a formal excuse for an unfinished fight, and that the price of that evening was paid on the operating table, not in the Octagon.
