After weeks of delays and behind-the-scenes attempts to piece together something meaningful, UFC 332 in Salt Lake City, Utah finally has a championship main event: Natalia Silva vs. Wang Cong for the vacant women’s flyweight belt.
Wait, what? The flyweight belt that Valentina Shevchenko has defended a whopping nine times in two title bouts since 2018? Is it free now? Silva vs. In announcing Cong, they referred to a bullet injury but did not go into detail about how the belt was put back to grab. A little more information was provided by the statement of Shevchenko’s coach Pavel Fedotov.
“We were supposed to fight on October 3 against Natalia Silva, but due to a shoulder and back ligament injury, we decided not to push things and postpone the fight,” Fedotov wrote (via Ushatayka). “Given that recovery will take a long time, we decided to temporarily vacate the belt and when he recovers, he will fight for it again.”
According to Fedotov, they expect it to take eight months to recover from the injury.
In the past, you might have expected an interim title to take less than a year after recovering from similar injuries. But these days, the UFC has a habit of asking injured champions to surrender their belts. Jamahal Hill did it when he ruptured his Achilles tendon and so did Jiri Publisher when he injured his shoulder. Now we have Valentina Shevchenko.
Hopefully, these fighters will be well compensated for giving up their hard-earned championship gold so the UFC can patch up the holes in its schedule with undisputed title fights. Hill and Prochazka never regained their belts after surrendering them. Will Shevchenko suffer the same fate?