This weekend, two notorious feminine blended martial artists, Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano, returned to competitors, with Rousey incomes an armbar end 17 seconds into the primary spherical in Most Useful Promotions’ debut MMA occasion.
Earlier than the rise of girls’s blended martial arts, girls’s blended martial arts existed totally on the fringes of the sports activities world, dotted throughout regional promotions, and was typically ignored and continuously questioned as a respectable a part of MMA’s future. Now, the panorama appears utterly completely different. Girls are headlining main UFC playing cards, producing world champions throughout a number of divisions, and competing in a sport that now not treats them because the exception.
Ronda Rousey, Gina Carano, and the rise of girls’s MMA
Rousey and Carano are each pioneers within the sport, however their legacies are outlined by what they completed contained in the cage. And they’re outlined by what occurred subsequent, how girls’s MMA grew past its early limitations and what it turned within the years since. However the change makes extra sense when you think about the place girls’s MMA began.
Earlier than girls’s MMA entered the UFC mainstream, it existed as small, fragmented promotions similar to Strikeforce, which was later acquired by the UFC in 2011, and EliteXC, which went bankrupt in 2008 earlier than its roster and belongings have been absorbed by Strikeforce.
One of many first girls to attain mainstream recognition was Carano. Her 2009 featherweight title battle in opposition to Strikeforce vs. Cris Cyborg marked the primary time a serious MMA promotion featured a girls’s bout as the primary occasion. Carano got here up simply quick in that battle, however she did not go unnoticed. Rousey took be aware of Carano’s success with Strikeforce and noticed a option to construct on that momentum.
Rousey is already properly versed in martial arts, profitable a gold medal for america in judo on the 2008 Olympics. She additionally turned the dominant bantamweight champion in Strikeforce earlier than the UFC took over girls’s MMA.
The UFC initially rejected the concept of introducing a girls’s division, citing a scarcity of expertise depth and restricted curiosity within the sport. Nevertheless, after signing Rousey in 2013, the UFC formally established the division by naming her the primary girls’s bantamweight champion.
Ronda Rousey made her first look within the UFC at UFC 157 in February 2013, defending her bantamweight title in opposition to Liz Carmouche. Rousey got here out on prime with a submission victory along with her signature armbar. This win firmly places girls’s MMA into the mainstream dialog.
Rousey rapidly turned a family identify, and the UFC promoted her as the game’s subsequent main star all through the mid-2010s. She went on a five-fight profitable streak from 2013 to 2015, however misplaced the bantamweight title to Holly Holm in November 2015. Her final look within the UFC was in December 2016, when she misplaced to Amanda Nunes by first-round TKO.
Regardless of a dropping streak on the finish of her profession and finally retiring from the game, Rousey’s legacy remained intact. Her rise from 2013 to 2015 helped speed up the expansion of girls’s MMA because the UFC expanded its girls’s roster and constructed new divisions.
The UFC launched a 115-pound strawweight in 2014, adopted by a 125-pound flyweight in 2017, and a 145-pound featherweight later that yr. Across the identical time, extra feminine fighters appeared on The Final Fighter, additional increasing the visibility of the game.
Because the Rousey period got here to an finish, a brand new customary started to take form on the prime of girls’s MMA. Nunes has emerged as a game-defining determine post-Rousey, reshaping expectations of what elite girls’s combating appears like.
In only a few quick years, feminine participation in MMA has expanded quickly, and the depth of expertise rapidly surpassed what existed throughout Rousey’s rise. That does not diminish Rousey’s affect, however fairly highlights how rapidly girls’s MMA has developed since she pushed it into the mainstream. Nunes’ TKO victory over Rousey was one of many clearest indicators of that evolution.
Within the years since Rousey’s final look within the UFC, Nunes has change into the defining face of girls’s MMA and an emblem of the game’s rising legitimacy. However her dominance has spawned a brand new technology of elite rivals and champions, together with Valentina Shevchenko, Weili Zhang, Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Rose Namajunas.
That evolution wasn’t simply felt on the skilled degree. Since 2013, girls have been one of many quickest rising demographics in MMA, in response to MMA INC. As girls’s participation in newbie MMA continues to develop world wide, girls are now not thought-about a uncommon presence in MMA gyms.
In accordance with the Worldwide Blended Martial Arts Federation, the proportion of feminine athletes will enhance from 1 in 7 rivals to 1 in 5 between 2023 and 2025. Girls’s MMA is now not combating for legitimacy. From native gyms to the primary occasion of the UFC, the game has grown into a completely established a part of trendy blended martial arts.
Fighters like Carano and Rousey helped open the door, however subsequent generations have confirmed that the door won’t ever shut once more.
