Freedom Fights 250 to Feature Pyrotechnics and Gnats

With just under three weeks to go, Freedom Fights 250 is starting to become more top of mind for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The (literal) groundwork is being placed on the South Lawn of the White House this week for what will be the largest formal ticketed event in White House history, surpassing Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Freedom Banquet”. The White House bunkers, beneath the surface of the South Lawn, will help support several thousand attendants, the Octagon, and seating arrangements, but it will also need to support the 92-foot steel arch structured lighting rig that has been dubbed by Dana White as “The Claw”.

The impressive rig will not only provide adequate lighting, but also prevent obscuring the view of the Washington Monument or South Portico for the TV audience, White and company had to get creative. The Claw, in theory, solves those issues and allows the outdoor event to not only maintain it’s identity, but also add a layer of impressive new age engineering that TKO will surely puff their chest about.

In order to test out the Claw’s capabilities, TAIT Global, which is a renowned staging and design team for live entertainment events, submitted a special events application to Warwick Township. The Warwick Township gladly provided us with the application, since they deem the document to be of public record. 

The individual representing TAIT as the on-site contact on this permit application denied any knowledge of the project when reached by phone, even offering up that we had the wrong phone number. The switchboard operator for TAIT soon after confirmed that the phone number did in fact belong to him.

The bottom of page one’s event description reads “Test installation of temporary open-air studio structure. Testing will include: Structure build, Scenery installation and fitting, small-scale lighting instrument testing. Small-scale pyrotechnics testing (permit by Pyrotechnico)”. Pyrotechnico has confirmed to SevereMMA.com that they will be providing pyrotechnics for the UFC at Freedom Fights 250. They also clarified that they will not be providing any drone installations, although that is another area of expertise for their company. 

We also got a sneak peek at a scale model of the Freedom Fights 250 set up on the White House lawn from former NBA player Michael Beasley. While streaming live on Kick last week at UFC headquarters in Las Vegas, Beasley’s cameraman briefly showed a small-scale model of what the White House grounds will look like on the day of the event. Much of this model was a mirror of previous renderings, however this version did include a canopy on top of the Claw, presumably to combat precipitation for this outdoor event.  

Weather has been a top concern for the UFC in anticipation of this event, but one thing that Dana White had perhaps failed to consider before a recent trip to an event at the Rose Garden is the overwhelming presence of gnats on the White House grounds; “President Trump just opened the Rose Garden two nights ago, and he invited me to dinner there. The amount of gnats that were flying around… I’m like “Holy sh*t… As soon as I got on the plane, I called my head of production and said, ‘Yeah, let me tell you about the gnat situation tonight…’ So when you’re a fighter, think about that lighting grid, the amount of power in the lights… moths, gnats, and God knows what else. These are all the little details that we have to think about. That’s why I don’t like fighting outside. Ever.” White later mentioned on the Boardroom podcast that perhaps a large fan would help to deter the insects.

We spoke with an entomologist at Georgetown University to get an idea of just how bad the gnat problem gets in the DC area during the summer. They mentioned that by mid-June, mosquitoes will be out, more dense in the evening. They also noted that gnats will be present in patches, and more abundantly so near bodies of water. It is important to remember that Washington DC was constructed on land that is commonly referred to as a “swamp” and is bordered by the Potomac River. 

The White House also went into lockdown this past Memorial Day Weekend after shots were fired near the executive mansion. Secret Service returned fire at the suspect, who later died on the way to the hospital. One civilian bystander was also struck during the exchange. The gunman was located on 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That location will be blocked off until June 28th, according to this image released by the National Park Services.

Saturday’s shooting is not an isolated incident, as just one month prior, a gunman stormed the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Before either of these incidents even happened, the Department of Homeland Security had already designated the Freedom Fights 250 event to be SEARS 1, as reported previously by TMZ.