Women’s MMA Refs Will Let You Beat Someone Half To Death

World Cup officiating has been completely crapulent, but it was not a good weekend for the subjective art of MMA officiating, either. I understand that fighting Cris “Cyborg” Santos isn’t an easy thing, and that her average training session leaves normal people screaming for mercy. I understand that people train very hard to get to the point of even getting a shot at someone like her in the ring, and that you’d want to give them every opportunity to stay in the fight against a woman who rends opponents into human jerky in the ring.

But watch this, and follow along with my time log.

1:01 Well, this isn’t so bad...

1:42 ...and now that lady’s dead.

1:48 It’s really not fair to beat up on a dead person like that.

2:27 Zombie lady is dead twice. i don’t know if that’s possible, but here we are.

2:48 Correction: dead three times, and completely defenseless.

That’s all before the three minute mark. I watched the whole thing, but conservatively the fight could have been stopped twice before the 3 minute mark in the first round since Jan Finney spent much of the time after this point lying on the ground curled up in a ball and weeping (something which is, I will point out, a thousand times more courageous than the screaming and fence-climbing you or I would have done.) There’s letting fighters go, and then there’s refusing to stop a lopsided beating that even the beat-er is seemingly begging to have stopped.

(BTW, if MMA referee Kim Winslow is in charge of your living will, she’s not turning off the machines until the morphine stops cutting the pain, and even then she might want to see a clear tap before she turns off life suport. Dissenting opinion may be found here.)