Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion sat down with ESPN for a one-on-one interview earlier this week to talk about her meteoric rise in the sport of mixed martial arts, and her role as the face of women’s mma. The talk naturally turned to her recent comments towards the currently suspended Cris ‘Cyborg’ Santos and the possibility of the two of them meeting.
Santos said she is unable to make 135 pounds, but would be willing to drop down to 140 in order to meet you in the cage. Would you accept the fight at anything other than the bantamweight limit?
I don’t owe her anything and I think it’s wrong to reward someone like that with a title fight and with all of the considerations they want after they disgrace the sport and their country like that. If, while she was doping, she could get down to 145, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that if she’s not doping, she could be lighter. When have you ever heard of somebody taking a bunch of steroids and then stopping and maintaining the same muscle mass? It’s a flawed argument. She’s come into fights overweight and comes into fights on steroids. She obviously has no respect for the people she is fighting. She’s never had a fair fight once in her life and I’m going to put my foot down once and for all and give her a fair fight. I can see why she is scared to death with it and completely against it. I’m the strongest competitor that she’s ever going to come across. She’s not going to have any of those advantages. For someone to be so mentally weak that they need to do that to get by, of course she is going to do everything she can to resist it. It’s going to reveal her as the fraud that she truly is.
A fight between the two of you would easily be one of the most anticipated in the sport. How would you plan on dealing with her relentless striking?
Cris “Cyborg” is not a technical striker. The way that she strikes plays very well into my style of fighting. When she fought Gina [Carano], she got mounted three times in a round. She’s very wild and just uses a lot of strength. But all of the principles of judo is using the strength and momentum of a person against them. So a lot of times, the more that she is flailing around and resisting, the more that it is going to help me out. I don’t feel like she has the awareness of distance or is technical enough and I intend to piss this girl off so much that there’s no way in God’s green earth that she is going to be able to have any kind of game plan. She is just going to come in there and see red and I’ll be in there calm, cool and collected.