Jessica Andrade’s strawweight championship run may have come to an end last Saturday, but she has no plans of fading into the background.
Weili Zhang defeated Jessica Andrade in 42 seconds in UFC Shenzhen’s main event to become the first-ever Chinese UFC champion. The last time Jessica Andrade suffered a KO/TKO was against Liz Carmouche in 2015, and that was more of a “positional TKO,” if you will, where Carmouche had Andrade mounted and unable to defend herself. Since and before that loss, Andrade had displayed a chin of granite and remarkable toughness in her contests, steadily walking forward regardless of how many shots connected to her face. But Andrade’s admirable campaign of resilience finally ended on Saturday, and Andrade walked Combate.com through how her defeat transpired (Transcript via Bloody Elbow):
“I felt the punch, then came the elbows,” Andrade said. “I kept blacking out and coming back and blacking out again. There wasn’t much to do. I couldn’t work my aggressiveness, my strikes. The little I put on her, she felt. It’s part of the job, one day you win, one day you lose.”
The last time Jessica Andrade lost a title fight was to Joanna Jedrzejczyk in May of 2017, which was also Andrade’s last career loss prior to Saturday. After the loss to Jedrzejczyk, Andrade went on a tear, defeating Claudia Gadelha, Tecia Torres, Karolina Kowalkiewicz, and then Rose Namajunas to become the strawweight champion. Andrade put in the work to get to that second title shot, and she is already looking forward to the day when she and Zhang stand across the Octagon once again:
“I’m very proud of what I did,” Andrade said. “To go through a different time zone, to come all the way here and fight her. She landed a good hand. I had never been knocked out before, and she did it. Who knows one day I can meet her again and then we will have a real fight.”
Do you believe we will ever see a rematch between Jessica Andrade and new strawweight champion Weili Zhang?
