Why fedor lost

SUB Triangle Armbar. Fedor Emelianenko Brett Rogers. Rogers Nov. Fedor Emelianenko Andrei Arlovski. Affliction - Day of Reckoning Jan.

Fedor Emelianenko Tim Sylvia. Affliction - Banned Jul. Fedor Emelianenko Hong Man Choi. SUB Armbar. Fedor Emelianenko Matt Lindland. BodogFight - Clash of Nations Apr. Fedor Emelianenko Mark Hunt. SUB Kimura. Fedor Emelianenko Mark Coleman. Fedor Emelianenko Wagner da Conceicao Martins.

Fedor Emelianenko Mirko Filipovic. Fedor Emelianenko Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. Fedor Emelianenko Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira.

Fedor Emelianenko Naoya Ogawa. Fedor Emelianenko Kevin Randleman. Fedor Emelianenko Yuji Nagata. Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye Dec. Fedor Emelianenko Gary Goodridge. Fedor Emelianenko Kazuyuki Fujita. Three and a half years later, Emelianenko returned to fighting. And by he was in Bellator, working for his old friend Scott Coker, who'd been his promoter with Strikeforce. It's been a wild run in Bellator for Emelianenko. All five of his fights have ended in first-round knockouts. Emelianenko's knockout of "Rampage" Jackson took place at Saitama Super Arena outside Tokyo, which years earlier had been the setting for both men's biggest moments in Pride.

This was no coincidence. The December fight was billed as the start of a Fedor retirement tour. The idea was for him to compete one last time in three locales of personal significance: Japan, Russia and the United States.

Nearly two years later, is the retirement tour still a thing? There has been no indication that Emelianenko will lay down his gloves in the center of the cage following Saturday's fight, but enough time has passed for us to wonder whether Fedor will keep going.

Either way, now is as good a time as any to remember the moments that have defined the career of the man known as "The Last Emperor. By the time Pride FC was sold to the UFC in , there was already revisionist history being written in the West about Emelianenko and his accomplishments. Hong Man Choi? Yuji Nagata? Some were questioning just how great Emelianenko was despite his having gone undefeated for nearly a decade.

It really took Emelianenko's short run with Affliction to make him undeniable as a great, at least in the eyes of many Western fans. Even now, there is a segment of UFC fans who don't give Emelianenko enough respect. At the Affliction event in July in Anaheim, California, Emelianenko blasted Sylvia and choked him out in 28 seconds.

Even UFC president Dana White, famously a Fedor detractor, couldn't help but be impressed, saying that Sylvia, one of his company's former heavyweight champions, was a "real guy. Six months later, also in Affliction, Emelianenko stopped Arlovski with an enormous right hand in Arlovski, whom Sherdog had ranked as the No.

Arlovski went for a jumping knee and Emelianenko absolutely crushed him with a right hand, turning his lights out. The poise, the timing, the technique, the explosiveness. That was Emelianenko in a nutshell. And beating Arlovski also gave the Russian legend bragging rights -- he beat just about all of the best heavyweights of his generation. For me and other fans who watched Pride I was very much just a fan back then , there was a certain sense of validation that Fedor was who we said he was.

Being a fan of MMA in Mexico 17 years ago wasn't easy. There were no legal ways to watch live events. If you were lucky, you could buy UFC or Pride DVDs while on a trip, or maybe get them by catalogue delivery six to eight weeks after their release. Because he is Mexican-American, that is the moment when the sport became a thing in Latin America. As I followed Velasquez, I heard him answer the same question dozens of times: His heavyweight GOAT was Fedor without a doubt, and Velasquez expected to fight him at some point in order to prove himself to be the best.

My favorite ones occurred between and , when Fedor beat arguably the best class of heavyweights in the history of the division. He went on an amazing streak. I can't say I have a favorite specific Fedor memory. Years of fight damage takes its toll on the human body and nobody is getting any younger. If Fedor won, which he was expected to do, Strikeforce would have been faced with what seems to be a recurring problem for the organization: one of its titleholders leaving the promotion.

There was something in his expression after the fight: restlessness, maybe even desolation. Fedor was supposed to beat Werdum. Enjoy our content?

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