While it’s very rare that a judges decision ever gets overturned by a commission, that’s exactly what happened this week when it was announced that the controversial decision in favor of Fedor Emelianenko over Fabio Maldonado was changed to a draw.
Due to the fact that the event was held in Fedor’s home country of Russia, and was sanctioned by the Russian MMA Union, the result will not be overturned by them. In fact, the Russian MMA Union, which Fedor serves as President for, denied Maldonado’s attempt to appeal the decision, citing a rule where an appeal must be officially entered within 40 minutes of the fight ending.
Because of what Maldonado claimed was a conflict of interest, he continued on with his attempts to get the decision overturned, as his team went above the Russian MMA Union to the World MMA Association (WMMAA). The WMMAA ended up suspending Radmir Gabdullin, (the Vice President of the Russian MMA Union, who just so happens to be a former M-1 Global fighter and training partner/friend of Fedor’s) who denied the initial appeal, and had three impartial judges re-evaluate and re-score the fight.
The three judges chosen were Youri Lamoureux from Canada, Lukasz Bosacki from Poland and Alexey Zemskov from Russia, all of which scored the fight the same way most in the MMA community did when they first saw it live on UFC Fight Pass, as they gave Maldonado the first round via a 10-8 score, and rounds two and three to Fedor via 10-9 scores, making the official result a 28-28 draw across the board.
While the Russian MMA Union won’t be honoring the decision of the WMMAA regarding the new draw ruling for the Fedor-Maldonado bout, which took place from St. Petersburg, Russia last month at the EFN 50 event, the rest of the MMA world will be going with the revised result.
H/T to BloodyElbow.com for some of the of information included in the above report.