Cris "Cyborg" Justino is the best featherweight women’s fighter in the world. Of that there is no dispute. It’s been the same story several years running, and it’s not going to change even after the UFC puts a new belt around the waist of either Holly Holm or Germaine de Randamie at UFC 208 in February.
This is a crowning of convenience over merit—the trickle-down effect of compounding mistakes with little accountability.
It’s a shame for Cyborg, and it’s a shame for the fight’s eventual winner, who can take pride in their win yet walk away with the full understanding of their place in the division.
How the UFC got here—and how they somehow managed to exclude Cyborg from the proceedings—is a textbook case of how the promotion’s fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants bookings and scattershot focus lead to unfortunate consequences, as well as how they spin the narrative to reflect blame away from themselves and on to the athletes.
Remember, this is the promotion that repeatedly told us that there wasn’t enough talent to begin a featherweight division as a rationale for repeatedly pressuring Cyborg to cut down to 135 pounds, and then when they realized she couldn’t do it, pushing her into meaningless 140-pound catch weights.
She did so as recently as late September, taking fans through the process of her horrific weight cut in a way that no other fighter ever has. At the time, UFC president Dana White reaffirmed that the organization had no plans of adding additional women’s weight classes.
"As far as a heavier division, no I don't see that happening," he told Globo (h/t MMA Fighting). "I don't see that happening any time soon.”
"Any time soon" lasted about two months, culminating in a rushed pairing of two fighters who have spent almost the entirety of their careers as bantamweights, and one of which (Holm) is on a two-fight losing streak.
So how did we get here?
To give you a reminder of how one completely unrelated thing can affect another in the UFC, remember that it was just over two weeks ago when UFC light-heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier withdrew from UFC 206, beginning a domino effect that ended with Conor McGregor being stripped of his featherweight belt.
That chain went like this: With Cormier out of the pay-per-view, a replacement headliner was needed. All the other champions were either scheduled or unavailable, and with the UFC’s back against the wall, they realized they could strip McGregor of one of his two belts, create an interim belt for the featherweight division—even though an interim belt already existed—and with a "title fight" atop the card, Voila, instant credibility is restored.
It was a ridiculous game of cause-and-effect in the name of business, and the same thing is now playing out again.
Within the last few weeks, the UFC has canceled events in The Philippines and California, the latter of which was a scheduled January 2017 pay-per-view. With the heavily leveraged deal that was struck by the new ownership team, the promotion can’t cancel events and expect to make its aggressive revenue targets, so they broke open the emergency glass and pulled another belt out of thin air.
Cyborg told ESPN's Brett Okamoto (h/t ABC News) on Tuesday that after her difficult weight cut, she wanted to wait until March, but the UFC wasn’t having any part of a four-week delay. They had an event to fill.
We offered three fights, and she turned them all down. This is a business. I had two girls who wanted to fight for the 145-pound title. This is the pros. If you play for the Patriots, you don't sit around and say, "I don't feel like playing this weekend."
We brought her in because she said she could make 135 pounds. When she couldn't, the weight cut was too hard, we created the 145-pound division—and she still doesn't want to fight.
To White, taking care of your health is apparently equal to not wanting to fight, never mind the sacrifices she made for the organization in 2016.
Anyone who doesn’t think there’s more to the story here is blissfully naive. Remember how the UFC has huge revenue targets to meet in 2017? It will also start shopping for a new TV deal, seeking a reported four-fold increase to $450 million per year, according to John Ourand, Liz Mullen and staff writers of Sports Business Journal, so it’s crucial to have a monster year.
Holm vs. de Randamie is not going to do huge business, but it can certainly set the stage for something that will.
Holm vs de Randamie is actually a great matchup, but it takes two skilled bantamweights away to create a division that isn't sustainable.
— Robert Sargent (@MMARising) December 14, 2016
Remember, Ronda Rousey returns later this month. If Rousey beats Nunes, suddenly the UFC has the possibility of sticking out the two-division champion possibility in front of her. Rousey recently said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that she was contemplating retirement. She’s still the second-biggest star in the promotion, so it would completely make sense to try to line up Rousey for the opportunity, whether it was against Holm (best-case scenario), Cyborg or de Randamie, and watch the cash-machine start ringing.
Let’s go back in time and remember that when the UFC established its first women’s division, it simply handed Rousey a title belt and moved on from there. Sure, Rousey went on to be an excellent champion, but at the time, she had all of one Strikeforce title defense on her resume.
By comparison, Cyborg held the Strikeforce and Invicta belts for a combined five-plus years, has been universally considered the best featherweight for longer than that and hasn’t tasted defeat in over a decade.
Yes, she tested positive for a steroid several years ago, and yes, she has occasionally made things hard on herself with her public grievances, but consider the entirety of her record against the hoops that she's been made to jump through and the UFC's treatment of her—White once publicly mocked her, saying she "looked like Wanderlei Silva in a dress and heels,"—and you’ll have at least part of the context behind this decision. The rest comes from the UFC’s blind ambition and an insatiable appetite for cash that must be fed.
To be clear, the machine stops for no one. Lesson by lesson, Cyborg has learned that, and even if she’s had her hopes dashed yet again, at least she can go to sleep today, tomorrow and on the night of UFC 208 with the full understanding that new title belt be damned, she’s still the best in the world.
