UFC Must Get Government Approval Before Coming to Vancouver

Ultimate Fighting Championships might be coming to Vancouver in 2010. Might being the key word. A mixed martial arts match will be held in Vancouver next June despite the city's current ban on the sport, announced Ultimate Fighting Championship's president over the weekend.

"Canada is the mecca of mixed martial arts right now," said UFC president Dana White at the UFC Fan Expo in Las Vegas.

This is not UFCs first attempt to visit Canada. The City of Vancouver has been rejecting the extreme sport since at least 2007. RockStar Weekly has unlocked original rejection requests from the City of Vancouver in 2007 you can visit the documents here and has discovered that the city motioned to have the Vancouver Athletic Commission stop sanctioning mixed martial arts events at that time and deflect the sanctioning to the Province of BC requesting they set up a regulating body to handle extreme sports. Anyone living in BC will know that the Campbell government does not move quickly when creating committees and making decisions that are not profitable for themselves. This has left UFC in a state of purgatory since that request was filed in September 07.

Montreal was the first Canadian city to host a UFC event hosted its first UFC event in 2008. UFC 83 was held without a major hitch on April 19, 2008, at the Bell Centre, where Montreal's Georges St. Pierre defeated Matt Serra to reclaim his welterweight belt. That event broke the attendance record for a UFC event and was also the fastest sellout in the organization's history. UFC returned to Montreal on April 18 in 2009 to another sold-out crowd.

Quebec has held sanctioned MMA events under similar rules to the UFC for over seven years. The most high-profile ones have been put on by TKO Championship Fighting, a Montreal-based organization which had held events at the Bell Centre since 2006, its last being TKO 35 in October.

The Quebec Athletic Commission (under the Régie des Alcools, des Courses et des Jeux) is re-evaluating rules that govern the sport of mixed martial arts within the province. To date, the QAC has been following the Unified Rules of MMA in North America. But since laws differ by city, state or province, a commission can insist on its own rules, which could differ drastically. In Vancouver, the sanctioning provided by the Vancouver Athletic Commission is not good enough for city council.

A recent study of the sports market in Canada found that two in ten Canadian adults (22%) are interested in the UFC, saying they are casual (16%) or avid (6%) fans of the sport. While the number of UFC fans is currently behind some mainstream sports, like Major League Baseball (38% of Canadian adults are fans), the UFC is gaining momentum and might soon approach the fan base of other sports such as NBA Basketball (26% of Canadian adults are fans). In fact, in terms of increasing interest among current fans, the UFC is ahead of all other sports surveyed.
The results are taken from Ipsos-Reid's Canadian Sports Monitor, which interviewed 2,000 Canadian adults in a comprehensive survey of the Canadian sports market.
The majority (73%) of UFC fans consider themselves to be "casual fans" - interested in occasional 'big events' - but many of them (39%) say their interest has increased in the past few years. The proportion of fans who are gaining interest is higher for the UFC than more than 30 other sports and sporting events surveyed, including Hockey and the Olympics.