UFC 284 results: Jones becomes heavyweight champion, Shevchenko loses title

UFC 284 results: Jones becomes heavyweight champion, Shevchenko loses title

It took Jon Jones a little more than two minutes to leave no stone unturned from the defense of Cyril Gan and win the vacant UFC heavyweight championship belt.

From the first seconds of the fight, which led the UFC 285 tournament in Las Vegas, the American began to put pressure on the Frenchman, and then easily transferred the opponent to the ground, failing a counterattack attempt.

Switching position, Jones pinned Gan to the net, effortlessly took his neck, and applied a guillotine choke, forcing referee Mark Goddard to stop the fight at 2:04 of the first round.

After a triumphant return to the octagon after a three-year hiatus, Jon Jones confirmed that he would be ready to defend his belt in July against former division champion Stipe Miocic, who had previously been named the official contender for the title.

In the co-main event, Alexa Grasso, a native of Mexico, became the author of one of the biggest upsets in the history of mixed martial arts, having managed not only to take away the UFC flyweight championship belt from Valentina Shevchenko, but also to finish Bullet ahead of schedule.

Already in the first round, the Mexican woman managed to create serious problems in the standing position for the current champion, in connection with which Shevchenko had to use her wrestling skills in the second and third five-minute periods, but in the fourth segment of the match, the native of Kyrgyzstan made a mistake, giving her opponent her back and allowing her to choke her from behind, put an end to the fight.

In the third most important event of the tournament, the undefeated Kazakh fighter Shavkat Rakhmonov won his seventeenth professional victory, finishing ahead of schedule of the American Jeff Neal, who had failed the weight cut the day before and lost thirty percent of the fee for the fight.

The top welterweight bout ended with 43 seconds left in the final round after a standing rear naked choke from Nomad, but before signaling the submission, Neil gave Rakhmonov a tough fight, managing to seriously shock his opponent at the start of the final five-minute period.

In a post-match interview, Shavkat Rakhmonov said that he wants to see Colby Covington as his next opponent, or the winner of the title rematch between Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman, who will meet in London in two weeks.

Among other results, we note the early victories of Bo Nikal, Drikus Du Plessis, Marc-Andre Barrio, Ian Garry and Tabata Ricci, as well as the successful debut in the organization of a native of Tajikistan, Loika Radjabov, who defeated the undefeated Argentine Esteban Ribovich by unanimous decision.

All UFC 285 results.

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