Former strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk announced her retirement after a KO loss to Zhang Weili back in June, but the 35-year-old has now admitted that she’s already had second thoughts about calling time on her career.
“It’s still hard,” Jędrzejczyk told BT Sport. “It was a spontaneous decision, but during fight week I felt that if something [happened], I will retire and it happened. The craziest thing about my retirement is that my last camp was the best camp in my fighting career. I felt so good. I was probably—not one of the best, but I was in the best shape ever. Weili Zhang caught me and I went down. And yeah. It just happened.
“But two weeks ago, I went crazy, man. I was calling my management. I was about to call [UFC president] Dana [White] and [UFC Chief Business Officer] Hunter [Campbell] to bring me back. Actually, I had this conversation with my coach, Mike Brown, and Dan Lambert, the owner of ATT. But yeah, it’s hard to like sit, think, like you’ve done so much, your legacy is so big. But I’ve been doing this for the last 19 years of my life, so it’s really hard.”
Jedrzejczyk’s coach Mike Brown has also recently addressed the issue of her possibly returning to action, but had suggested that he would be content to see her remain retired.
“Of course, if that’s what she wanted to do,” Brown told MMAjunkie. “She’s healthy, which is crazy she’s had no major injuries after all these years of fighting. Of course I would be on board, but I would also be really content with her retiring, and hopefully we’ll see her in the Hall of Fame very soon.”
If Jedrzejczyk did choose to return then she wouldn’t be able to come back straight away as she’s already been removed from the USADA testing pool and would have to go onto that again for six months before she’d be eligible to compete.
