According to the Mixed-Martial Arts Web site TATAME, MMA is the current focus of a huge controversy in Argentina.

Franco Lescano, age 30, died of multiple fractures in his neck, which were suffered during a practice workout in South America.

“The boy left the gym a quadriplegic and died 21 days later,” said Eduardo Duarte, who runs academies across Argentina.

According to the local press, Lescano had been training at Tiger Gym for his professional debut when he got injured.

The injury caused the fractures of two vertebrae, paralyzing Lescano from the neck down.

“What I could understand, after talking to people who were there, was that [Lescano] was doing the double leg, took a guillotine and fell upon his neck, but nobody knows for sure what happened,” said Duarte.

With Lescano’s death, the Argentine press obviously began to criticize the sport.

“They got pretty tough, they said that it was a barbarism, and compared it to the old 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, and that it is a struggle until one goes down.

“It was pretty ugly.”

The Peruvian, David Zalacar, who was training with Lescano at the time of the accident, has been charged with second degree murder.

The family of the dead athlete accused the academy, Tiger Gym, of negligence, 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,” complained Duarte.

The big question remains, will the recent off-putting publicity in MMA negatively impact how the sport is perceived in areas of the United States, Canada, and other places around the world that still continue to have reservations about legalizing this sport?

Or does Lescano’s death simply reinforce the need for legalization and the safe implementation of rules and sporting standards?

Either way, this is beyond tragic.

by James Ryan