Joe Rogan is a UFC analyst and stand-up comedian, so it’s well within his purview to offer commentary on the physical appearance of fighters. As weird as that sentence sounds, it’s true, but Rogan received pushback for his criticism of Jose Aldo, who on Saturday lost his featherweight championship fight to Conor McGregor in the time it took you to read this paragraph.
Rogan believed his microphone was off during the UFC 194 broadcast when he said Aldo’s body looked “deflated” and “smooth,” which was taken as Rogan believing Aldo was doing something fishy to attain that physique.
Here’s part of what Rogan, a 48-year-old man, had to say about all this in an apology on his Instagram page.
There was an audio “leak” from inside the UFC production truck right before Saturday night’s fight where I said that Jose Aldo’s body looked smooth and deflated, and that I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions and that it could have just been from doing a lot of cardio. I also said he looked nervous. Needless to say this caused a lot of controversy.
Since then people have posted photos of Aldo recently as well as from this fight, and he looked very similar.
So for that, I stand corrected. My apologies for being wrong to Aldo and his trainer Andre Pederneiras. I have nothing but admiration and respect for both of them.
Pederneiras, much like Rogan, posted photos of Aldo to his social-media account, because this is apparently what a fighting beef between adults looks like in 2015.
https://twitter.com/dedepederneiras/status/677207241607487488
We need Rogan calling out the smoothness of the bodies of athletes in other sports. Hearing about how Yasiel Puig looks too smooth instead of about his bat flips would be a nice change of pace.
