To All Press,

In regards to the incident in which Mr. Bob Sapp didn’t fight in the Amsterdam Arena on May 13th, there have been conflicting reports including that he had been unwell. The K-1 organization would like to set the record straight regarding the no-show:

Sadaharu Tanikawa

Mr. Bob Sapp still has the exclusive long-term fighting contract with the K-1 organization. Based on the contract, Mr. Sapp arrived in The Netherlands on May 10th, attended the event press conference, the Fuji Television event promotion, and the event opening ceremony. However, before the event Mr. Sapp made demands which were absolutely impossible to meet. Even though we did everything possible to persuade him to stay, he suddenly left the venue just before his fight sporting a bandage. We consider his behavior as both unprofessional and disappointing. In order to prevent such incidents, we will do our best to handle our fighters better and arrange fights more carefully.

Lastly, we would like to express our great appreciation to Mr. Peter Aerts and his devotion to K-1 as he did us the greatest favor of accepting the fight against Mr. Hoost with only one hour's notice before the fight.
And also we would like to extend our most sincere apologies to the 20,000 fans who came to see the Ernesto Hoost versus Bob Sapp bout, and to the millions of fans around the world who were looking forward to this match-up.

Sincerely,

K-1 Event Producer
Sadaharu Tanikawa