Death in training causes polemic in Argentina

By Guilherme Cruz

Photo Télam/El Litoral

MMA is causing a big polemic in Argentina. On the end of March, the argentine Franco Lescano, 30 years-old, died of multiple fractures suffered during a workout on the South America. "The boy left the gym quadriplegic and died 21 days later," says Eduardo Duarte, who runs academies in Argentina, to TATAME.

According to the local press, the athlete had been training on Tiger Gym for his debut on the professional rings when he got injured. The blow caused fractures on two vertebrae, making him quadriplegic. "What I could understand, talking to people who were there, is that the guy was doing the double leg, took a guillotine and fell upon his neck, but nobody knows for sure what happened," said the Brazilian.

With the death of the athlete, the argentine press began to criticize the sport. "They got pretty tough, they said that was a barbarism, compared it to gladiators. They said that the MMA is one piece of thing without any rules and inside a cage, so that participants cannot escape and also said it doesn’t have a judge nor rounds, that is a struggle until one gos down. It was pretty ugly”, he explains, doing the part of reversion of the sport image for the TV shows.

The athlete who was training with Franco Lescano as the time of the accident, the Peruvian David Zalacar, is being charged of second degree murder. The family of the dead athlete accused the academy of negligence, Tiger Gym, and the organization that governs the sport in Argentina revealed that the academy did not have authorization to work. "It is an academy of a guy who does not know what he was doing," complains Eduardo.