Following Fabricio Werdum’s upset win over Cain Velasquez at UFC 188, was there a single overarching reason? Was it a fluke?
The environment
UFC 188, as a whole, was strange. If you watched the broadcast, you probably heard Joe and Goldberg mentioning “altitude” approximately four thousand times, but it’s worth noting: Mexico City isn’t just high. Mexico City is polluted.
A city of 20 million people with limited public transportation and widespread poverty would produce an impressive amount of pollution under normal circumstances, but Mexico City is a special case. It’s not only at elevation- it’s in a valley, a topographical bowl of sorts between mountains and volcanoes. Here, the pollution is trapped between dry upper air and a lower layer over the city, creating a “thermal inversion” which acts as a stopper. Beneath it, thinned air makes cars run more inefficiently, and photochemical stimulation of particles and ozone above the barrier compounds the problem.
The role of sunlight raises another interesting point: the UFC held 180 in the city, but that event didn’t have the rep for exhausting its fighters that 188 has quickly gained. 180 was in November, 188 was in June. There wasn’t a dramatic difference in temperature (24 to 28 degrees celsius, via accuweather.com), but even if bullshit theories about the inside of an air-conditioned arena have no merit, harsh climates are generally even more taxing when it’s hotter.
The air quality of Mexico City has reportedly made vast strides from its nadir in the ‘90s, where bird were reported to drop from the sky, and open-sewer systems combined with a million-strong army of stray dogs to drive hundreds of tons of dried particulate faeces into the air. It’s no longer one of the most polluted cities in the world. Still, it’s hard to think of many places with combined elements of air quality which are less conducive to a prizefight.
Thus from the beginning of the card, fighters who invested in body work were reaping astonishing, borderline disproportionate dividends, and pressure fighters found themselves wilting under their own pace. Gabriel Benitez laced Clay Collard with a sizzling body kick under the ribs, and had the typically aggressive featherweight looking tentative and lost. If Eddie Alvarez was soundly outboxed by Gilbert Melendez in the first frame, he did land a brace of body punches, and was able to pull away over the second and third despite being functionally half-blind. According to Dana White, at least six fighters threw up after their fights, including Yair Rodriguez who had puked down his walkout shirt on the broadcast.
Fighting like Cain Velasquez
By the time the event was over, Cain Velasquez had once again been stopped in a championship fight, and once again, we can talk about hype trains, and being exposed, and possibly Fedor. But… let’s not.
Instead, let’s think about what happened to Cain on Saturday and how it compares to the last time that Cain lost, back in 2011 on the first UFC on Fox. I don’t and never have ascribed to the notion that Velasquez only lost to Junior Dos Santos because he was injured. He fought completely differently to his second and third bouts with his Brazilian rival, and as a matter of fact, to all his other fights. He didn’t fight like Cain Velasquez.
The difference between the champion and the challenger mentality represents a sea-change between “taking” and “holding” which has killed a number of promising title reigns in their crib. Champions are often at their best, or their most impressive, when they first take the belt. It’s when they’re hungriest, when what they’re after is just within their reach and all they have to do is rip it away. Think Aldo-Brown, or Jones-Shogun, or GSP-Hughes.
Afterwards, they have to deal with the fact that they now have what they were after, and that they have to hold it while other people take it away. This is a sometimes-painful shift from acquisition to consolidation, and it’s obviously why you hear quite so many newly minted champions talking about “super fights” where they’ll move up in weight. It’s not hubris, but more that they’re struggling to reconcile a career spent struggling to the top with the fact that they’re now at the top, and they’re flailing around for another challenge which will allow them to keep climbing up.
The best and longest-tenured champions have historically managed to retool their mentalities and approaches. Jon Jones changed from being an aggressive clinch takedown machine to being a man who kicked people in the knee a lot. Aldo the Wildman became a clinical diet of jabs, hooks and low kicks, Anderson Silva refused to lead, and GSP became infamous for how risk-averse he was. The idea is building an approach which is stable yet flexible enough to last in the long run.
Cain Velasquez’s first title defense against Dos Santos was similar to GSP’s loss to Matt Serra: fighting to defend for the first time in his career, he turned into something of an aimless kickboxer, waiting to see what his opponent would do, and was hit behind the ear and knocked out. The rematch and subsequent rubber match with Dos Santos showed that he had come to terms with what his championship style was and would be, as he chased the Brazilian round the cage, literally falling on his face in pursuit of takedowns in the early going.
If the default stability of many other champions was to build defensive shells which couldn’t be breached, then Velasquez learned to insulate himself with ceaseless aggression. He’d get into positions where he could stake his cardio and will against his opponent, confident that he was going to come out on top of that equation every time. He’d fight more like Cain Velasquez than ever.
Against Fabricio Werdum at UFC 188, whether it was due to injuries, or being unprepared for the environment, or because the Brazilian was just that good, being Cain Velasquez was killing him.
Werdum’s best trick
The first key to Werdum’s win was the clinch. Criticisms in Dos Santos’s losses to Velasquez have often been that JDS didn’t work for underhooks, but the problem with this is that constantly pummelling for an underhook left Cain time to throw short punches from the clinch while keeping Dos Santos pinned with his own head.
Werdum went straight for the root of the problem- he grabbed the top of the champ’s skull with the double collar, and bodily pulled him to the side. Normally this is used to break posture to land a knee, but Werdum largely used it to redirect Cain’s forward pressure until he could get out of the fence. Most of the time he couldn’t land his own offense because his own posture was at least partially broken from being forced into the cage. Cain wasn’t defenseless, either: when Werdum flared his elbows he punched up the middle with uppercuts, and when Werdum pinched them Velasquez came over the top, including a punch reminiscent of the strike which Weidman used to drop Silva. It didn’t drop or finish Werdum, though.
The Go Horse is the joker of MMA. From pointing at the floor before smashing Big Country in the face, to “Werdum time” to the troll-face, he’s the wacky guy who cloaks the fact that he’s a big, mean fighter behind rubbery and amiable bullshit. Of his tricks, the simplest and best may be his chin, and like the best lies, it lives on a tiny a sliver of truth.
Back when he fought Dos Santos, he was flabby and under-prepared, and got summarily smashed with what remains the most brutal uppercut thrown in the UFC. Since then, Werdum has developed a history of selling strikes. He feigns being hurt and falls to the ground to trick his opponent into falling into his guard. He did it to Mark Hunt and Alistair Overeem, to little effect. He did it to Fedor Emilianenko, and tapped him out. Velasquez “dropped” Werdum in the first round of their title fight. It’s easy to blend together the image of Werdum’s ears wiggling from Cigano’s upper with all those times when he fell to the canvas, easy to forget: Fabricio Werdum has an absolutely phenomenal chin.
Velasquez dusted Bigfoot and Nogueira in punching exchanges, and decked JDS more than once. For all the early talks of his “pillow fists”, he has real power. Yet, when Werdum gave up on selling strikes and just stood and traded, Velasquez would come off worse. Velasquez mixed up head-hunting and leg kicks, but his normal attritional process just wasn’t wearing down his opponent as much as it wore away himself. Werdum used the clinch to knee Cain in the guts, and landed sporadic body kicks which sapped the champion’s endurance.
The fight on the feet between Velasquez and Werdum which took place at the mid-range wasn’t pretty, but it was thrilling. More than that, it spoke more than anything else to the transformation that Werdum has undergone. This was the man who once threw a fight he could have won against Alistair Overeem away by butt-scooting and begging the Dutchman to dive into his guard, banging it out toe-to-toe with one of the most feared heavyweights to step into the UFC cage, breaking a man who was famous for being the one who did the breaking.
Velasquez, for his part, was trapped. He learned the hard way never to take a step back against Junior Dos Santos, learned that pressure was the safe space, the place where he could never be beaten, so he stepped in again and again, and threw more and more punches, and got more and more exhausted and beaten up, sucking the thin air down. At the end, mangled and bloody, he went all the way back to the earliest Cain Velasquez and returned to his wrestling. He launched a double leg, straight into a trap Werdum had been laying for years, one which yawned wide, and closed shut one last time.
What “the reason” was
There are a lot of reasons put out for the upset, as there always are. More than this, people are convinced that their explanation is the right one. It was all because of Werdum’s clinch game. It was because Velasquez couldn’t take him down. It was because of Velasquez’s layoff. All these things are probably part of it, but the extent to which each one dominates can’t be known by any analyst or fan. Even Werdum and Velasquez themselves likely only hold small pieces of the explanation.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter. If Velasquez truly did struggle because of the environment, for example, this isn’t and can’t be an excuse. MMA is simultaneously a sport of inches and one of murderous complexity. The amount of things which can go wrong which are almost completely out of a fighter’s control are enormous; the range of fluky or unfortunate outcomes immeasurable. Take a look at basically all of Drew Dober’s recent career.
If Velasquez failed against Werdum due to something which he could and should should have taken account of, something as simple as only training in Mexico City for two weeks, that’s far more damning than if he’d just gotten caught. Training is something which is the responsibility of the fighter and his camp, Keeping a tight lid on these kind of eventualities is something which all the greats have done. Even at 188, for all the fighters who gassed, there were those who had clearly prepared. Cathal Pendred didn’t light the world on fire, but he took the fight from the aptly named “Dodger” down the stretch. Charles Rosa put out a spiriting (if ultimately failing) rally against Yair Rodriguez.
Werdum, for his part, took every precaution to ensure his place in history. Heavyweight champ at 37 years old, perhaps only eclipsed in achievements by Fedor, a man he beat. It might be partially because it’s Werdum, the trickster, that we look for these subtle, roundabout explanations for why he won, when just how amazing he is should be readily apparent to us all.