After back-to-back “Female Fighter of the Year” wins for Amanda Nunes in MMA Junkie’s annual awards, the No. 1 women’s pound-for-pound fighter on the planet took some time off in 2020 to start a family, opening the door for another name to ascend to the top of the sport for the past calendar year.
And while stalwarts such as Bellator women’s featherweight champ Cris Cyborg and UFC women’s flyweight titleholder Valentina Shevchenko each made real bids for that honor, MMA Junkie ultimately went in a different direction.
The Far East.
Chinese strawweight Zhang Weili (21-1 MMA, 5-0 UFC) fought just once in 2020, but it also happened to be MMA Junkie’s “Fight of the Year.” It’s the first time a women’s fight has earned that award, and the bout is widely regarded as one of the greatest UFC title fights of all time.
The UFC strawweight champion defended her title for the first time at March’s UFC 248, and it came against the woman who helped establish the division in “The Strawweight Queen,” Joanna Jedrzejczyk. The five-round battle was an epic encounter, high-paced from start to finish. The two combined to land more than 350 strikes over the 25-minute encounter.
Joanna Jedrzejczyk after UFC 248. (Photo by Harry How, Getty Images)
Jedrzejczyk’s gnarly hematoma will be the lasting image in many people’s minds of this historic clash, but the buzz inside Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena won’t soon be forgotten by anyone in attendance that night. The fight was even on all three judges’ scorecards heading into the fifth round, and both women pressed on as one would hope with a UFC belt on the line. In the end, judges Michael Bell and Derek Cleary awarded Weili the final round, thus handing her a split decision win in a bout that you simply didn’t know the result of until Bruce Buffer bellowed out “and still.”
But there was more to this moment than just a “Fight of the Year” clash.
For Weili, this was indisputable proof she was the best strawweight on the planet and worthy of the UFC title. After all, while she had needed just 42 seconds to wrest the belt away from Jessica Andrade, there was some dispute coming in whether or not Weili was truly deserving of the title shot, or whether at just 3-0 in the octagon, she had been rushed to the opportunity simply because the UFC needed a Chinese fighter to headline its August 2019 card in Shenzhen.
After the UFC 248 win, there were no more questions about Weili’s power, skill, heart, or worthiness.
It was also an opportunity for Weili to further assert herself as a national sporting icon in her native China, a market the UFC is committed so strongly to developing, the promotion spent $13 million to build a UFC Performance Institute in Shanghai.
(Stephen R. Sylvanie, USA TODAY Sports)
Sure, Cyborg (23-2 MMA, 2-0 BMMA) deserves real discussion as an honorable mention for her “grand slam” title win, becoming the first woman to ever hold titles in the UFC, Bellator, Strikeforce and Invicta FC. And Shevchenko (20-3 MMA, 9-2 UFC) continued to assert her dominance in 2020 with two more defenses of her title in which she looked pretty much untouchable.
But Weili’s thrilling fight will be remembered far longer than any of Cyborg or Shevchenko’s four combined victories on the year, and 2020 was the moment “Magnum” firmly established herself among the elite in the sport.
One can only hope we might be treated to a Shevchenko-Weili matchup somewhere down the line.