UFC fighter Holly Holm responded to claims by former UFC bantamweight and champion Ronda Rousey, who claimed not only that she was the best fighter to ever live but that the only reason she lost to Holm was because she was concussed.
An undefeated Holm shocked the world when she knocked out the champion Rousey in 2015 after a second-round head kick. Nearly a decade later, Rousey claimed that a series of concussions is what caused her to lose to Holm, despite Rousey being the best she had ever been.
“I know that I’m the greatest fighter that has ever lived,” Rousey said during a podcast.
Regarding her loss to Holm, Rousey went on to tell the host that her “mouth guard was bad” and that she had recently suffered a concussion from “slipping down some stairs.” This, coupled with a “terrible weight cut” meant she was out on her feet the entire fight, she claimed, which lasted a total of five minutes and 59 seconds.
Holm was asked about Rousey’s remarks at a press conference ahead of UFC 300.
“Do you feel like she’s trying to take away from your win all these years later? Do you think this is accurate?” a reporter asked.
“Everything I say, which I’m sure people will just take parts of and make it sound how you guys want … I say this all out of respect: In order to have a big upset like that fight was, you have to have a dominant champion, so without her being so dominant, then I couldn’t have been able to have such an upset,” Holm prefaced.
“But with that being said, I was the better fighter, I was the better fighter that night, and every fighter at this point, if you’ve made a career of fighting, you’ve had a concussion at some point.”
Holm added that prior to her UFC career, she “definitely had some concussions” and noted that she would never use that as an excuse for a loss.
“I think that it’s probably just hard for her to really want to maybe admit that I was just the better fighter. Was she so dominant and a good champion? 100%. I give her that, but she wasn’t better than me and especially that night,” Holm explained.
Holm has continued to fight at 42 years old, whereas Rousey retired a year after her fight with Holm at 28 years old.
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