[ad_1]
When the fight was over, in the short lull that preceded the sale of the next fight, Daniel Cormier was alone in the center of the canvas with his eyes closed. His arms were up, holding his own head, and he was beaming. Bruce Buffer screamed his name. A beat later during an interview, smiling and overwhelmed in the middle of an answer to a question that did not really matter, he was saying, "I do not have a problem. I never knew what I could become. But tonight I got the answer.
Daniel Cormier, who ran into the ring wearing his mandatory T-shirt on a long-sleeved T-shirt and found himself in his warm-up pants; who is sort of the main wrestling coach at Gilroy High School but donates his entire salary to his assistant coaches; who Lucas Bourdon appropriately nicknamed "The Daddest Man on the Planet", knocked out Stipe Miocic and found the answer he had always hoped for. Perhaps just as important, he avoided letting the question hang forever.
Cormier was already the UFC Heavyweight Champion, but this title would have always been accompanied by an asterisk. This asterisk looks like everything Jon Jones would look like – it was punctuated with sneers about your accomplishments forever. Now, Cormier is also the heavyweight champion, only the second person to simultaneously hold UFC belts in two different weight classes, and only the fifth to win two, period. (The other names are Conor McGregor, BJ Penn, Randy Couture, and Georges St. Pierre, it's air rarefied.) Cormier achieved this feat at age 39 by unloading a straight and crushing hook from the body to body in the jaw of the First person to have successfully defended the title of the UFC Heavyweight three times. "What can I do so that every time people talk about the big ones, do they mention Daniel Cormier?" He asked about the training sequences in the UFC prefiguration video . "For me, becoming a champion of two divisions means inheritance, the legacy remains forever, everything else fades away." That's only when you look at the scope of "all the rest." remains for Cormier, and how easily it could have disappeared, that all this takes on real meaning.It's hard to understand what it must be to be one of the best athletes alive. much harder to understand what it must be to be one of the best athletes alive and to get to not be the best again and again.
After winning two National junior college wrestling championships, Cormier moved to the NCAA Division I competition at Oklahoma State, but was upset in his first year before obtaining the All-American status. from his last year at school, his run to a national championship is over in the final when he landed there at the same time as Cael Sanderson. Cormier was a game, but Sanderson went 158-0 in all his other games and this one was no different.
For years during his international career, Cormier was tied with the world's best, but a bronze medal at the World Championships FILA's fight in 2007 was its best result on an international stage. At the 2004 Olympic Games, he finished fourth, just out of the medals. In 2008, he was about to run in a field that he had a real chance of beating, but when reducing weight to 96 kg, his kidneys failed and he was kicked out of the Beijing Olympics. He had no chance at another.
Cormier switched to mixed martial arts as a heavyweight, but he was over 30 at the time of his first professional fight. Still, he was an authentic world class athlete in a sport that does not attract a lot of them to his heavier divisions. He absorbed skills as the 30-year-old novices are not supposed to, and did things like the former champion Josh Barnett of 265 pounds seems unusually easy
Faced with the prospect of having to go through Velasquez to win a belt, he chose to abandon the weight category entirely.
He returned to the dangerous practice of weight reduction, which had already damaged his loins and cost him his Olympic dreams, going down to 205 pounds.
What he had for his loyalty was Jon "Bones" Jones.
However, you do not think of drugs, the bureaucracy and the iniquity of doping, or the relationship between an artist and his art. deny Jones' sublime talent. He is the best lightweight in the history of MMA, and if you are ready to put aside all these factors, it's not difficult to position him as his biggest fight period. He is a super-genius of combat, and he is the sworn enemy of Daniel Cormier.
Jones could easily have been built in a laboratory to be Cormier's foil. It is large and flexible, at Cormier's sleepy endometrium, its members appearing somewhere on the far horizon to destroy the opponents of revolutionary angles. At 23 in 2011, he was already beating Mauricio "Shogun" Rua in his 14th fight to become the youngest UFC champion. He displays a casual scorn for … just about everything, really, lags behind opponents, fans and regulators. And at least in two fights, the second of which was canceled by a positive drug test, Cormier could not beat him.
Their first meeting in January 2015 was competitive, but it was clear that Jones was on another. and, over the course of the struggle, he surpassed even Cormier, as if to prove a point. Their second meeting, in July 2017, was wonderful, with Cormier making adjustments and pushing Jones as nobody, but Alexander Gustafsson had done it, seeming to have finally been able to unlock the puzzle. In the third round, however, Jones took advantage of Cormier's tendency to look predictably to his right, which Jones and his team had noticed years earlier, and flattens it with a left whim. Cormier was, in all respects, crushed.
When it was announced that Jones was tested positive for the Turinabol anabolic steroid, at least his second PED test failed and the most recent in a continuing series of disgraces, the result was changed into -competitions. The belt was returned to Cormier, but given the uncertain duration of Jones' ban and the lingering uncertainty about the heavyweight division, Cormier was still finding himself with more questions than answers. It turned out that the window for solving them was closing. But Miocic came next.
The body of Cain Velasquez was first victim of Fabricio Werdum and the height of Mexico City, then of his own deterioration. Medical issues have kept him inactive since July 2016, which was only his second fight since he defeated Junior dos Santos in October 2013. Cormier cleaned up the non-Jon Jones portion of light light ranks, beating Gustafsson, Volkan Oezdemir and Anthony Johnson twice. Miocic, meanwhile, has won six consecutive wins against heavyweights, all dominantly, and at the same time set the record defenses of the title. An overlap between the two champions made sense for everyone and gave Cormier a chance, perhaps the last, to win the legacy he had always hoped for.
He seized it. He may be remembered as the man who could not defeat Jon Jones and maybe he will be. But now, fans will also have to remember a stout, 5-foot-11, 39-year-old before trading with a 6-foot-4 pin-up from a firefighters schedule that has knocked out a chain of giants built much closer to the upper limit of heavyweights. They will remember him using his suffocating clinch to move his left arm from a tie to a hook to open the space for that right hand to break Miocic's chin. They will remember him flying over the champion and thrusting nails into brutal coffins until the referee is forced to intervene. They will remember him screaming and wandering in the cage like a dangerous dangerous tower Jim Valvano
They may remember that later, Cormier was going to cut a catch promo on the mic, and Brock Lesnar would enter the ring, and there would be pushing and theatrical. Cormier said that he wanted to end his career in March 2019, when he will turn 40 years old. He is both a great professional wrestling fan and a longtime friend of Lesnar, who has wrestled in the same circles. University. While Lesnar is, on paper, not really a competitive threat at this point, it's still a draw and a pay-per-view with both could make them both a considerable sum in a sport that's under – criminally extends his Talent. And why not? Now that they will remember him standing in the cage and smiling from one ear to the other, taking it all in his first moments as the UFC heavyweight champion, Daniel Cormier has nothing to prove.
[ad_2]
Source link
