NEW YORK — Sitting atop a podium during a media availability at a midtown Manhattan hotel on Wednesday, answering questions fluently in Russian, English, and Spanish for half an hour in the final days of a weight cut, Valentina Shevchenko offered a sermon on how combat sports came to prevalence in the United States and what she repeatedly referred back to as “the beauty of martial arts.”
She referenced Edmund Kealoha Parker, who founded and codified American Kenpo in the 1950s; she named Bill Wallace, the kickboxing pioneer, and Benny Urquidez, who competed across disciplines in the 1970s when mixed martial arts was neither known nor named; she cited inspiration from Elvis Presley, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Even bodybuilders and actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were sourced for their contributions to the culture. Shevchenko came to New York for a fight. But first, she offered a history lesson.
“It’s all tied together. The techniques — karate, taekwondo, boxing, jiu jitsu, grappling, all kinds of wrestling. This is amazing that we have this modern, very universal martial arts now,” Shevchenko said. “I’m very happy that I’m living in the right time, at the right place, and I’m able to show my skills that I’ve developed during all 32 years I’ve been practicing martial arts.”
All 32 years. Thirty-two. As in, since 1993, when Shevchenko was five, and first began training in taekwondo. She was onto Muay Thai by 12 and won her first kickboxing title at 15 in 2003, the same year she made her MMA debut in Kyrgyzstan. Later that year, she won another fight in South Korea and worked her way to an 11-1 record, with too many kickboxing and Muay Thai titles to list in between, before her UFC debut in 2015.
Now 37 and UFC’s flyweight champion, presiding over a division in which three of the top-five ranked fighters were six years old or younger when she made her professional debut, Shevchenko is nearly out of achievements to pursue. She’s cleaned out her division twice over. She’s avenged her only loss in the last eight years.
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Watch UFC 322 on Sportsnet+
Jack Della Maddalena defends the welterweight title against Islam Makhachev and women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko faces Zhang Weili. Watch UFC 322 on Saturday, Nov. 15, with prelim coverage beginning 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT, and pay-per-view main card starting at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT.
It’s one of many reasons why, Saturday, the UFC is reaching down into its strawweight division to find Shevchenko a challenge — Weili Zhang, the two-time champion who vacated her title to test herself up a weight class against an all-time great.
Zhang, too, was out of capable competition after running off five straight victories over strawweight’s best, the last three via lopsided unanimous decisions. A win against a fighter that talented and dominant on Saturday would be yet another major milestone on Shevchenko’s CV and tie Amanda Nunes for the most victories in women’s championship fights in UFC history. But Shevchenko speaks as if she’s transcended beyond accomplishments.
“You know, it’s never been something that I was, like, chasing — chasing the numbers, chasing being better than someone, having more defences or something like that. Maybe this is the secret of having so many defences — because you are not chasing them,” Shevchenko said with a laugh. “Martial arts, for me, it’s my life. … I want to show the art of martial arts, the beauty of fighting. This is my mindset. That’s why, for me, even the hardest things I’ve done, it was not too hard for me.”
Not much more needs to be explained in the promotion of this fight than Shevchenko and Zhang’s status as the consensus top two pound-for-pound women’s fighters on the planet. Matchups atop the pound-for-pound rankings are rare in any context, but particularly on the women’s side, where recession set in following the non-renewal of Cris Cyborg’s contract and Nunes’s retirement. It’s easily the biggest women’s fight UFC has put on in half a decade, since Zhang and Joanna Jedrzejczyk waged a barn-burning, back-and-forth five-rounder at UFC 248.
The promotion can only hope for a contest half as riveting. Of course, Shevchenko’s style doesn’t lend itself to thrillers. She’s an incredibly disciplined, mentally focused fighter, sitting back at range, reading opponents, and reacting swiftly to punish them for any vulnerabilities they present. She maximizes her extensive experience and decades-drilled striking to attack opportunistically — never recklessly. It’s hard to create the chaos necessary for an instant classic when Shevchenko so steadfastly refuses to put herself in disadvantageous positions.
But maybe Zhang is the one to pull it out of her. The 36-year-old is extremely well-trained and enters each fight with well-tailored game plans for each opponent. Where Shevchenko utilizes more or less the same tactics each time out, Zhang often incorporates different looks. But that can lead to some in-fight trial-and-error, which is a dangerous game to play against someone as sound as Shevchenko.
And Zhang isn’t afraid of a brawl, which can be an advantage and a liability. It’s what led directly to her first UFC loss, a monumental head kick knockout by Rose Namajunas. Turning 38 in March, Shevchenko doesn’t have the same finishing ability she once did. But she can still make you pay in an instant for the wrong mistake at the wrong time.
“Valentina is very good. Very strong, striking is very good. She’s a 13-time Muay Thai world champion, right?” Zhang said. “But I just want to be like water — smooth.”
That’s a Bruce Lee line, as Shevchenko would certainly point out. Everyone’s a novice in comparison to her, but Zhang’s a student of the game herself. She began with Wushu when she was six and dabbled in kickboxing, wrestling, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on her way to the UFC. She has as many submissions as knockouts since her promotional debut in 2018.
It’s what makes this fight so compelling — the skillsets, the credentials, the legacies. The contrast in styles that gives rise to uncertainty. Zhang’s an aggressive striker who weaponizes pressure to get into range and land power shots, but often leaves herself susceptible to counterstrikes; Shevchenko’s a measured technician who manages distance to keep opponents within her range while out of theirs, but can have her rhythm and timing disrupted when put on the back foot.
Plus, there’s the unknown impact the size differential will make. Shevchenko’s a true flyweight who fought up at bantamweight earlier in her career. Meanwhile, Zhang’s only experience outside of strawweight is a division up at flyweight. Will her power transfer up a weight class? Will her gas tank be the same while carrying extra weight? Who will have a strength advantage when they lock up?
We’ve seen Shevchenko use clinch work along the fence to control opponents with bigger frames than Zhang’s. And it stands to reason that one way to nullify Zhang’s forward pressure would be to turn her into the fence and grind her down with close-range elbows and knees. It wouldn’t make for the most entertaining fight. But tactically, Shevchenko could leverage her size to drain Zhang’s energy and make her more manageable in later rounds.
Yet, that’s assuming Shevchenko has a size and strength advantage, something we won’t truly know until fight night. If Zhang’s on her physical level, she can make life difficult for Shevchenko by never accepting a position, digging underhooks, forcing scrambles, and looking for elbows in tight as she did in her last fight, a five-round schooling of Tatiana Suarez.
There are a hundred ways this one could go. And perhaps that leads to us seeing these two fight more than once. We’ll see. No sense getting ahead of ourselves now. Which is as good an opening as any for a touch more Shevchenko wisdom.
“You know, I’m not the person and I’m not the fighter who is going to think about the next step without doing the previous step,” she said. “This is, for me, the most important. My whole energy is going to be like a ball that is going to be thrown at a target.
“This is what I need to do in terms of winning the fight. Thinking if my ball is going to strike here or there. Thinking about everything else, how you can reach success? You cannot. You have to put all (your) energy only in one place, only straight ahead. You have to think only about what you’re going to face now, not after. This is what’s important. Because without now, there’s not going to be after.”
from Sportsnet.ca
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