The reigning, two-time flyweight champion pitched a shutout against two-time strawweight queen Zhang Weili in the VeChain UFC 322 co-main event, earning a clean sweep of the scorecards to collect her second successful title defense this year, her ninth such result across her two reigns, and her 11th UFC championship fight victory in total, which tied Amanda Nunes for the most ever.
Some will want to point to the obvious size difference between the two competitors, which surely played a factor, but also does a disservice to the technical mastery and deep arsenal of weapons “Bullet” has at her disposal and displayed on Saturday night. Yes, she was the bigger, stronger athlete, but she’s also a brilliant striker who picked her shots well and hurt the speedier Zhang to the body multiple times while also showing excellent skills on the canvas.
She formulates excellent game plans, sticks to them, and knows how to win, eschewing everything else in favor of pursuing the victory. Sometimes that leads to dominant grappling like we saw against Zhang, which may not be the most exciting, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive.
What makes the 37-year-old’s case for all-time status unassailable (at least in my eyes) is that she did extremely well at bantamweight before relocating to the flyweight division, beating ex-Strikeforce champ Sarah Kaufman, former UFC titleholder Holly Holm, and future champ Julianna Pena, with both of her losses to Amanda Nunes coming in competitive fights where she was out-sized, but not out-skilled.
Shevchenko is 26-4-1 for her career, and she avenged two of those setbacks in championship bouts, defeating Liz Carmouche in her second flyweight defense and Alexa Grasso to close out their trilogy last year. She has fresh challengers at the ready in Natalia Silva and Erin Blanchfield, plus the possibility is always there for a move back to bantamweight and another shot at gold there.