“What’s next, who will survive the knife stab?”: new ‘combat sport’ Power Slap increasingly popular, but also increasingly controversial | More Sports

Wednesday’s bouncer was the first so-called 800-pound (362-kilogram) clash between “super-heavyweights” Dayne “Da Hawaiian Hitman” Viernes and Adam “Slap for Cash” Hutchinson. While the latter stuck a chocolate bar between his teeth, he made his appearance on stage for the weigh-in at the Apex, where White also hosts his UFC events in Las Vegas. Both fighters together accounted for 374 kilograms, dry on the hook. Both survived the first attempt, but at hit number two, the American Hutchinson irrevocably hit the canvas after a true sledgehammer blow.

The origin of the ‘sport’ is in Eastern Europe, where three years ago the 168 kilogram heavy Russian Vasiliy Khamotiskiy was a real sensation. In a video you can see how ‘Dumpling’, as his nickname is, beats ‘gothic’ Pete Davidson to win 500 euros. In other videos, he crashed watermelons or threw tractor tires into the air.

But in October 2021 things went wrong for the first time during Punchdown, when the Polish ‘slap fighter’ and bodybuilder Artur ‘Waluś’ Walczak (46) suffered severe brain damage after the fourth blow during an event in Wroclaw. In the hospital he ended up in a coma to die a month later after organ failure. An investigation into security conditions was launched, but to little avail. Punchdown merely changed its name and is now called Slap Fighting Championship.

Experts ask questions. For example, there is the well-known American neurologist Chris Nowinski, who graduated from Harvard and later became a wrestler himself. He criticized the sport by posting a video from Power Slap 2 in which a contestant, Chris Kennedy, after going down exhibits the so-called fencing or fencing response that indicates a traumatic brain injury. The victim’s forearms then move into an unnatural position for several seconds after the blow. Elongated or bent, usually in the air.

“This is sad,” tweeted Nowinski, co-founder and president of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “Notice the screen response indicating the initial brain damage. This man could never be the same again. next Who can survive a knife stab?”

“Since no defense is allowed, you’re going to get a lot of concussions and even total unconsciousness,” journalist Trent Reinsmith writes on the UFC news site Bloody Elbow. “This is what you get when you let 13-year-old boys invent a new sport,” adds his fellow journalist Ben Fowlkes. Luke Thomas, a martial arts analyst for CBS, says on Twitter, “This is pretty shameless. There is no protection at all. There are no barriers at all. Then you might as well start kicking each other in the private parts.”

But Dana White defends his Power Slap tooth and nail and says that a lot of money is spent to provide the participants with the necessary medical attention during and after the camp. “Together with the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC), I came up with clearly defined rules, rankings, weight classes and medical tests. But people have yet to understand this, just as they did with MMA. Look, in boxing, fighters sometimes take 300 to 400 blows per fight. Slap fighting is just a few blows… You know, if you don’t like it, don’t even look at it.”

But look, there is. White to the critics who think that Slap fighting should disappear quickly: “This sport is here to stay. I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, but a Slap fight video on TikTok averages 10 million views. To put that in perspective: for MMA it is 1.5 million, for UFC 700,000 and NFL 545,000. This is a sport for the modern sports enthusiast. This will go all the way through. Power Slap has it all next level to go.”

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