Stipe Miocic has Tom Aspinall’s back. The former UFC heavyweight champion praised Aspinall for vacating the heavyweight title after the eye injury that has kept the Englishman out of the Octagon for a year, Bloody Elbow reported on X on Sunday.
Miocic has firsthand experience with this. According to Bloody Elbow, he pointed to a similar injury he suffered in a fight against Daniel Cormier. That makes him one of the few men alive who knows what it feels like to hold the heavyweight title and worry about his eyesight at the same time. The post didn’t carry his exact words, so we won’t put any in his mouth.
The injury goes back to UFC 321 in October 2025, when Ciryl Gane poked Aspinall in the eyes during their title fight. The bout was ruled a no-contest, and MMA Fighting reports Aspinall has since gone through multiple eye surgeries.
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The division kept moving without him. Gane knocked out Alex Pereira in the second round at UFC White House on June 14 to win the interim belt. Then Aspinall decided to step away from the title because of lingering problems with his eyes, and Gane was promoted to undisputed champion.
That promotion didn’t arrive clean. Pereira has spent months blaming referee Herb Dean for letting back-of-the-head shots slide during the finishing flurry, and the UFC recently released corner footage of his head coach, Plinio Cruz, screaming “back of the head” at Dean. Add the eye poke that started all this, and Gane has picked up a reputation he can’t seem to shake.
He has a couple of defenders, at least. On Dominick Cruz’s Love & War podcast, Cruz and T.J. Dillashaw both argued Gane isn’t fouling on purpose. “I don’t think [Gane] is a purposeful cheater at all,” Dillashaw said.
Now the heavyweight picture finally has dates on it. Gane makes his first title defense against Josh Hokit in the UFC 334 main event on Nov. 14 at Madison Square Garden. Pereira, still chasing the first three-division title in UFC history, meets Sergei Pavlovich in the UFC 335 co-main event in December.
My take: Aspinall made the right call, and Miocic is right to say so out loud. Interim belts are a waiting room with a gold plate on the wall, and the heavyweight division spent a year sitting in one while everybody checked on Aspinall’s surgeries. Walking away from a title he never lost in a fight is a brutal thing to swallow. It also gave the division one champion instead of a placeholder and a question mark. Hokit gets the first crack at that champion on Nov. 14, and Aspinall gets to worry about his eyes first.
