Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey isn’t ready to give up on Cris Cyborg just yet.
Despite Cyborg’s insistence that her body is unable to cut enough weight to reach the 135-pound limit, Rousey continued throw public jabs at the suspended former featherweight champ on Monday’s episode of The MMA Hour, criticizing her for flip-flopping on the weight issue and deriding her career as nothing more than a product of cheating and steroid abuse.
“If you can make 145 [pounds] while you’re super juiced out, you can make 135 if you’re clean,” Rousey brashly declared.
“Cyborg has never had a fair fight. If you really look at it, she’s had fights where she came in and outweighed the other girl by 12 pounds and then they still fought. This girl has a long history of cheating and using drugs, and coming in overweight, and no one’s ever put their foot down ever about it.
“If we did a catchweight of 140, I 100 percent think she’d just come in overweight and be like, ‘Whatever, come fight me.’ Want to know why? Because she’s done it several times before. She has a track record of doing these things. This girl does things that are blatantly disrespectful to her opponents, over and over and over her whole career. Someone needs to put their foot down about it. So, yeah, I’m going to be the one that has to do it because I can.”
Cyborg has long expressed interest in fighting Rousey in the past, however recently she seems to have moved on from the feud. Following Rousey’s lopsided victory over Sarah Kaufman and subsequent callout of the Brazilian, Cyborg posted a surprising rant on her Twitter account that perplexed even Strikeforce officials, stating that a drop to bantamweight was out of the question and she would be awaiting her release from Strikeforce, as her real division no longer existed.
Nonetheless, luring Cyborg into the potential superfight continues to be at the top of Rousey’s agenda. Last month Rousey’s manager, Darin Harvey, asked for the bout to be overseen by extreme and extensive drug testing, including hair follicle testing that could detect illegal substances up to three months after their original ingestion. Now, however, Rousey has backed off the request.
“You know what? I really don’t care about the drug testing,” the champion conceded. “She’s obviously been getting around it for many years. Advances in drug testing, they come up with new ways to catch people every single year because people are coming up with new ways to get around them all the time. The cheaters are always just ahead of the people trying to catch them. That’s why there’s always more cheaters. I think the only real way to ensure this is a fair fight is to have her come down to 135, where if she’s doping, anything that she’s taking will be just as much of a detriment as it will be a help to her.”
If, at some point in the future, the two women ever come to some form of agreement, Rousey believes the bout would be a historic moment, not only for women’s MMA, but for MMA as a whole.
“I think if it was done right and it was done correctly, you could have people watching that fight that have never seen a single MMA fight before. Lots of them. I think it could be the biggest MMA fight of all-time,” said Rousey.
“I’m serious. Think about it. Every MMA fan will watch, and a whole bunch of other people that aren’t even the least bit interested in MMA would watch. That’s the kind of demographic that fight could reach to that none of the men can right now.”
Ultimately, given Cyborg’s reluctance and the fact that her suspension stretches into December, the notion of a superfight still remains a pipe dream for now. That being said, a back-up plan already appears to be in place.
Strikeforce’s newest addition, highly-touted former Olympian Sara McMann, is slated to debut against Liz Carmouche on Nov. 3, 2012. Both women have caught the eye of Rousey, who admits she’ll be watching the match with great interest.
“I think that’s going to be an amazing fight,” Rousey explained. “Both of those girls, I think, are really high class fighters. Of course, Sara McMann, she’s an Olympic medalist. She’s an elite athlete. And Liz Carmouche, not only is she extremely marketable, she has a cool back story.
“So I’d be very interested to see that fight, and I’d be very interested to fight the winner.”
Rousey has yet to pinpoint a date for her next title defense, although she hopes to return to action sometime in late 2012 or early 2013. In the meantime, the champ will have plenty to keep herself busy, as the her extra-curricular résumé continues to expand in a fashion reminiscent of another former Strikeforce darling, Gina Carano.
While some fans may be wary of Rousey eventually jumping ship for the lucrative glow of Hollywood, as Carano did, she made it clear her primary focus will always be on the fight game.
“We have a lot of really crazy opportunities coming up right now and we’re just kind of looking at everything that’s available, in terms of picking and choosing the right way to go,” Rousey concluded.
“But I’m still a fighter first and foremost. That’s what got me here, and that’s what I still want to do. That’s what I’m really passionate about. So you guys have nothing to worry about.”