It was one of the greatest upsets in MMA history. Amanda Nunes, reigning queen of women’s MMA, lost via rear naked choke to an upstart in Julianna Pena. In doing so, she lost the women’s bantamweight title to Pena. Nunes looked nothing like her usual self in the Octagon that day, revealing to MMAJunkie ahead of their rematch at UFC 277 this weekend that she’d had one of the worst training camps of her career.
“A lot of things went wrong in my camp and I still moved forward with the camp. I didn’t want to let the fight fall through. Nina [Nunes] was always trying to tell me like, ‘Listen, if we have to pull out of this fight to get 100 percent, we can do that.’ But I didn’t want to listen.”
Nunes Reveals She Was Injured and Advised to Pull Out of First Pena Fight
I let the fight fall through once because I had COVID and I didn’t want to let the fight fall through again. So that pressure to, like, not fight once again, and the UFC put an interim belt, and that was giving me a hard time to let that fight go.
So I don’t think it would’ve been right for me to let an interim belt be put out there. So because of that, I decided to fight. But a lot of things went wrong, and I had a rough time training. Sometimes we make mistakes and I paid for that. It is what it is. Sometimes you get things wrong.”
A huge issue was her health leading into the fight, with “both knees” reportedly compromised. “Both my knees were pretty bad. I sprained that I won’t be able to recover. I was in and out of the doctor doing a lot of repair to see if I was able to at least get a good solid camp, and I wasn’t.
I was doing whatever was possible to get in the camp, using only my arms and doing only upper body. I convinced myself that I was good, and I paid.” Now, Nunes is driven to recapture the title and become double champ once again.
“I want to be a champion again, this is driving me forward. And I’m a fighter, I cannot do anything else. I have to keep positive, and I have to keep moving forward in my career. This opportunity is to get my belt back, and I’m not letting anything doubt me. Actually, losing the belt fired me up again.”
Will we see the old Amanda Nunes back in action at UFC 277? Let us know what you think in the comments.
