Following last night’s UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House the recipients of the special one-off augmented bonus awards were announced.
Rather than the new normal of $100,000 bonuses, for this evening only the winners of the ‘Fight Of The Night’ award were each given a whopping $400,000.
And nobody was ever in any doubt about which fight was going to take that bonus as the main event lightweight title clash between Justin Gaethje and Ilia Topuria proved to be a thriller.
Lightweight champion Topuria came into the fight as a big favorite, but though he confidently took the fight to his opponent in the early stages of the fight, it was Gaethje who was repeatedly finding a home for his punches. Topuria’s face was soon sporting visible damage, but he persisted with applying pressure and doing his best to walk through Gaethje’s hard-htting offense.
It didn’t seem like the smartest strategy, but to fair to Topuria, in the second round he started to turn the screw, repeatedly getting into close quarters to butcher Gaethje’s body, which soon took a toll, forcing him to drop to the canvas. A finish was almost within Topuria’s grasp, but he chose to go for armbar and triangle choke finishes that didn’t pay off and gave Gaethje time to recover.
All that exertion trying, but failing to stop Gaethje seemed to drain Topuria as in the third round his output dropped drastically, while his opponent was finding his second wind and went back on the offensive, putting the champ down with a big right hand. Topuria got back up with his face a bloodied mess and managed to survive until the end of the round while taking more punishment.
It looked like the fight might be stopped prior to the 4th round, but Topuria insisted he was ok to continue despite his swollen left and right eyes. And the round was somewhat competitive, with Gaethje still applying more damage, but Topuria managing to land a takedown. However, when he went for another Gaethje sprawled and landed a punishing knee to the ribs. Soaked in blood and looking completely spent, Topuria made it back to his stool prior to the final round, but his corner had seen enough and waved off the fight, leading to Gaethje winning by TKO to be crowned the new lightweight champion.
Gaethje’s impressive victory was enough to also earn him one of the two ‘Performance Of The Night’ awards too, worth a whopping $425,000 on this occasion, meaning that in total he secured a bumper $825,000 in bonuses for his nights work.
The other $425,000 ‘Performance Of The Night’ award went to Ciryl Gane, who was able to outstrike former two-division champ Alex Pereira for a round-and-a-half on his way to an interim heavyweight title wnning TKO victory.
Gane looked comfortable throughout the fight, but really started to make his mark early in the second round as he caught Pereira stepping in with a flush jab that sat him down, before blasting him with big elbows to the head. Pereira struggled back to his feet under-fire, but still looked dazed as Gane continued to land big punches, before sending him reeling against the cage with left and right hands to force the ref to step in, resulting in a TKO win at 1.27mins of the second round.
