Despite his one-minute loss to Junior dos Santos last November, Cain Velasquez remains one of the best heavyweights in the world.
Actually, I’d say he’s the best overall heavyweight in the world, despite no longer holding the title. After all, anybody can get clipped with the kind of punch Velasquez did. The loss doesn’t diminish his skills in the slightest.
Velasquez told Yahoo’s Kevin Iole that he knew he wouldn’t stay undefeated forever:
I’m a realist. I knew I wasn’t going to go through my career undefeated. That’s how this sport is. People lose. Even the best guys lose. I knew as soon as it was over, I had to pick myself back up and keep going forward. I do have some extra motivation now, for sure, but I wish that for that night things had gone differently and that the fans had gotten the fight they came to see.
That’s a smart line of thinking for any fighter in the game. The level of talent in the game today far surpasses, at least from an overall sense, the kind of heavyweight talent that existed back when Fedor Emelianenko was running up his undefeated record. You can be a dominant heavyweight and still run into someone with the power to put you on your back with an errant punch behind your ear.
Velasquez still has the best wrestling pedigree in the UFC’s heavyweight division, at least until Daniel Cormier makes his way over from Strikeforce. He also has brutal punching power, speed and a gas tank that will enable him to fight forever without getting tired.
I have a feeling Frank Mir‘s going to find this out the hard way when he faces off with Velasquez at UFC 146 in May.
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