A Doctor Reacts to Conor McGregor’s Broken Leg at UFC 264

“No doubt about it, this was a really unusual, flukey type of injury,” he says. “McGregor’s ankle actually looked like it fractured before the main fracture occurred… McGregor kind of plants on that left foot as he’s getting ready to push off, and you can see that slight little tweak, you can see the outer portion of his ankle shift outward. Honestly, I think this is when the break actually was first initiated, before he stepped on it, inverting the ankle, causing that more complete injury.”

What happened, essentially, was that McGregor rolled his ankle, Sutterer explains, going into a serious amount of inversion due to a lack of stability as a result of his prior step. “It’s a common mechanism for a lateral ankle sprain that we see in sports all the time,” he continues, “but now there’s no stability there… all this torsional twisting load gets transferred up through his tibia, into the fibula, making this break much more severe.”

The fibula likely fractured first, followed by the tibia. Sutterer also speculates that there may have been some pre-existing trauma or weakness in McGregor’s leg, which may have contributed to the severity of the injury.

“What we have to remember about bones is that they’re really strong when you squeeze them and put them into compression, but when you start twisting bones, they’re not nearly as strong,” he says.