‘Cyborg’ gets her shot — at last
Cris Justino should have been fighting for the title long before now
Five months after its inauspicious and controversial debut at UFC 209, the women’s featherweight division is poised to take its mulligan this weekend at UFC 214 in Anaheim as the women who always should have been the focal point of the division finally get the chance to fight for UFC gold.
Cris “Cyborg” Justino has been one of the most dominant fighters to step into the cage over the last decade. The former Strikeforce and Invicta FC champion is unbeaten over her last 18 fights and earned stoppages in all but two of those appearances. She’s laid waste to talented veterans, middling contenders and overmatched newcomers alike.
After earning a pair of stoppage victories in unnecessary catchweight bouts to begin her UFC tenure, it seemed obvious that any championship fight in the featherweight division had to involve Justino, but that’s not how things worked out.
With the Brazilian superstar sidelined because of health concerns over weight cuts, the UFC opted to match former bantamweight champ Holly Holm against unheralded Dutch striker Germaine de Randamie in a bout to crown the inaugural women’s featherweight champion. Despite being an exciting clash of strikers, the contest always felt like a placeholder — the best option in a sea of underwhelming choices that would set the table for “Cyborg” challenging for the belt later in the year.
De Randamie won a controversial decision in a fight where the best strikes she landed came after the buzzer at the end of the second round.
Rather than using her post-fight interview to set up a fight with Justino, the veteran kick-boxer talked about needing surgery to correct an injury she suffered two years early before going ghost for a couple months. When she resurfaced, de Randamie refused to fight Justino, citing her 2011 positive test for the banned substance stanozolol as her reason.
The UFC stripped her of the title a few weeks later, matching Justino with Invicta FC featherweight champ Megan Anderson in a battle for the vacant title before the Australia was forced to withdraw and replaced by her bantamweight counterpart, veteran Tonya Evinger.
It has taken several months, a couple scuttled matches and one championship fight that probably shouldn’t have happened, but the UFC has finally arrived at the place it should have been all along: with Justino fighting for the featherweight title and set to be the centrepiece of the division. It happens July. 29 at UFC 214 in Anaheim.
Justino is a force of nature inside the cage — the type of devastating finisher that fans flock to see, regardless of whom she’s facing. Case in point: her headlining assignment on FS1 against unknown Swedish newcomer Lina Lansberg drew more than a million viewers and registered as one of the yop 10 mostwatched UFC events on the channel at the time.
Even though there isn’t a great deal of depth in the women’s featherweight division, the UFC can add fighters to the roster as necessary and build around “Cyborg” the same way they did with Ronda Rousey and the women’s bantamweight division when it was initially introduced. While the Brazilian doesn’t have the mainstream marketability and crossover appeal of the now departed former Olympian, she’s too good to not be competing on the biggest stage in the sport and forcing her into arbitrary catchweight assignments.
Justino is a foundational cornerstone for a division and has the potential to rule the division for a number of years, as she hasn’t logged that many miles over the course of her 12-year career and has only been out of the first round six times in 19 fights.
Anderson will be back and should be part of the plan going forward. Holm seems willing to make appearances at 145 as well. Beyond that, the UFC can adopt a “figure it out on the fly” approach because as long as “Cyborg” is at the centre of things and laying waste to everyone that steps into the Octagon across from her, people are going to pay attention.
Seldom do you get a second chance to make a first impression, but that’s what is happening with the UFC featherweight division this weekend and this time around, the organization seems to have gotten it right.
Spencer Kyte covers MMA for The Sun and The Province. Follow him on social media: @spencerkyte.