Rose Namajunas grateful to be UFC champ again – after mid-camp hurdle

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Rose Namajunas made history Saturday at UFC 261 and said overcoming an in-camp psychological hurdle may have helped her along the way.

Namajunas (10-4 MMA, 8-3 UFC) stopped women’s strawweight champion Zhang Weili (21-2 MMA, 5-1 UFC) with a first-round knockout in the co-main event at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla. It was the UFC’s first event in front of fans in more than a year.

Her head kick was followed up with some punches on the canvas, and it made Namajunas the first women’s fighter in UFC history to recapture a belt.

“I felt there was a really good chance I could drop her, for sure,” Namajunas said after the fight. “My power is something different – not a lot of girls can hit like me.”

Namajunas was a slight underdog in the fight. Weili was about a 2-1 favorite. UFC president Dana White said he’s not opposed to Weili getting a rematch. She claimed the fight was stopped too early.

Namajunas said she’d be up for it, but also would be up for anyone the UFC wants to give her.

“There’s no obvious answer at the moment,” she said. “I kind of want to see how Carla (Esparza) and (Xiaonan) Yan play out (in May).

“I could probably do whatever I want right now. It’s just a matter of what seems appealing to me at the moment. I kind of have to let things settle for a bit.”

In the final weeks before the fight, though, Namajunas took some heat for comments she made about Weili, who is from China. Namajunas traces her direct ancestry to Lithuania, and her “better dead than red” comment, recalling a Cold War phrase in the U.S. in reference to Communism, took the attention away from the fight and onto politics.

But she said that was something she worked through perhaps differently this time than she would have when she first was champion, which she has said afterward she wasn’t prepared for yet.

“I was thankful for the obstacle to overcome that because every champion goes through ups and downs of people loving them and people hating them at the same time,” Namajunas said.

Namajunas first won the strawweight title against then-dominant champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk at UFC 217 in late 2017 with a first-round TKO. She beat her in a rematch six months later. But after 13 months off, she lost the belt to Jessica Andrade on a slam knockout in 2019.

After more than a year off, Namajunas returned in July 2020 and beat Andrade in a rematch after Andrade had lost the title to Weili in her first defense. And Saturday, she came full circle with her second title-clinching KO.