Correction:
I made a mistake.
I don’t think Conor’s injury happened because he took 5 years off and his body wasn’t conditioned.
Watching this replay, it looks like he’d practiced that kick countless times. You can even see him warming it up backstage.
The problem was when he tried that kick, his body was still moving forward when his foot landed.
And his leg was bent around 20 degrees.
That’s a classic mechanism for an ACL (maybe MCL) injury that we see in the literature
Sometimes elite athletes get injured because elite sports are dangerous.