Superkarate.ru reports the UFC has signed longtime Russo-Ukranian heavyweight, Alexey Oleinik. Oleinik, who has bounced a bit between heavyweight and light heavyweight throughout his career, will enter the UFC on a nine fight winning streak including victories over Dion Staring, Jeff Monson, Tony Lopez, and most recently Mirko Filipovic. At age 36, he’s one of the more traveled vets on the MMA circuit, holding an overall record of 48-9-1.
Oleinik trains principally out of the K-Dojo Warrior Tribe in the US, home to top welter weight prospect Albert Tumenov. He’s more recently joined the Oplot Team as well, leading to a large number of his recent fights coming under the Oplot Challenge banner. Of course, it hasn’t been all sunshine and roses in Oleinik’s long career. He was part of the 2010 Bellator Heavyweight tournament, which saw him gain a split decision victory over Mike Hayes, before dropping to Neil Grove via a 45 second TKO.
Watching him fight, it’s still easy to see his flaws at play. Most notably, he’s just not a striker, and never will be. He wings huge, looping punches at opponents, hoping to get them to raise their guard and open up to his following shot attempt. As a grappling oriented heavyweight he’s got a nasty submission game and a willingness to do anything to drag the fight to the mat. But like many other large grapplers, the more tired he gets the more his striking deteriorates. However, with his experience and in a field that still contains very few wrestlers or grapplers, there are a lot of good, solid fights for him in the UFC.
Outside of MMA Oleinik was the 2005 Combat Sambo world champion and is a fourth degree Jujutsu black belt. Watching him slap a wicked neck crank on Filipovic was pretty fun (unless you’re exceptionally nostalgic), so it should be interesteing to see what he can do against the Matt Mitriones, Shawn Jordans, and Brendan Schaubs of the world.
He has a history of fighting at light heavyweight as well, so who knows, maybe he’ll drop and give that division a much needed injection of talent. To get us acquainted, here’s his fight against Jeff Monson from June of this year:
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