The co-main event of UFC 285 was a highly-anticipated clash between women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko and challenger Alexa Grasso. Shevchenko, looking for her eighth straight defense of the title, faced a tough challenge from Grasso, who was hoping to become the third Mexican UFC champion in recent months.
Shevchenko had a badly-timed level change stuffed in round 4. She paid for a weak spinning attack that allowed Grasso to take her back. Grasso secured a deep choke, and although Shevchenko was unrelenting as long as she could, she tapped out.
To on lookers, this looked like a particularly fortuitous moment however Grasso recently shared that this exact move was something she and her team repeatedly drilled including in the locker room before UFC 285.
“Warm up before going to the event. The back take after the spin kick was trained for MONTHS” – Grasso captioned the footage.
Another MMA pundit pointed out the similarity between this and the infamous Luke Rockhold/Chris Weidman contest.
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Shevchenko still maintains she put on a dominant performance ahead of the mistake that led to the submission finish. Whether she was winning or not remains open to interpretation. She’s likely to get a rematch considering she was a champion who defended the title a number of times. Her coach Pavel Fedotov is unlikely to publicly comment on the matter. He’s been the Shevchenko sister’s coach from the time she was just 8 years old (and her sister was 11). We should also mention that Fedotov is married to Valentina’s sister Antonina in another one of those uncanny MMA situations.
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“That was a colossal mistake,” Rockhold’s head coach at AKA, Javier Mendez, said of Weidman’s failed wheel kick.
“Because we didn’t know what was going to happen when someone was on top of Chris, or if Luke could stay on top of him. Luke proved what he said all along, that he felt he had the best MMA jiu-jitsu out there for top control, and he proved it.”
Rockhold became a Middleweight champion with that win over Weidman.