Henry Cejudo will be the third Olympic gold medalist to compete for UFC after signing a promotional contract announced Friday.
Cejudo became the youngest U.S. Olympic wrestling champion at 21 at Beijing 2008. The son of illegal immigrants from Mexico, his story gained instant fame, and was told in a book, “American Victory.”
He did not qualify for London at the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials and gave up wrestling to start a mixed martial arts career.
“In wrestling, you’re talking about a fraternity of champions, and I got a chance to be a part of that Olympic championship club,” he said, according to UFC.com. “And anyone that ever won the Olympics in wrestling, there’s something different about them. And that’s something that I’ve always wanted to carry over to mixed martial arts when it comes to discipline, when it comes to technique, and when it comes to becoming an overall fighter. Everything that I did to win a gold medal, I’m practically transferring it over to mixed martial arts.”
Cejudo’s first UFC bout will be in Sacramento, Calif., on Aug. 30 in the flyweight division, though he’s 6-0 with four knockouts already as a pro.
“I always wanted to become a student of the game and at least get six to eight fights before coming to the UFC,” he told UFC.com. “Now I think I’m in my prime, and I’ve never felt this strong in my life. I won the Olympics at 21. I could only grow half a mustache (laughs), and now I’ve got a full beard.”
Cejudo joins fellow wrestlers Kevin Jackson and Mark Schultz in competing in UFC after winning Olympic golds. Of course, one of the most famous names in MMA is 2008 Olympic judo bronze medalist Ronda Rousey.
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Someone was missing from this past summer’s World Para Swimming Championships. Jessica Long, the second-most-decorated U.S. Paralympian in history, was absent from a global championship meet for the first time in 20 years.
Long made the team for June’s worlds in Portugal, but she dropped out before the meet, citing burnout and a post-Games blues after an enjoyable fifth Paralympics in Tokyo, where she won three golds, two silvers and a bronze.
“It felt too soon to go and race,” at worlds, she said. “It’s really hard when you’re expected to constantly win and perform. I want to go and present my absolute best. Mentally, I was feeling a little negative. I don’t feel my best. I think it’s better if I just pull out.”
Long returned at the national championships in Charlotte earlier this month. It came at the end of a year devoid of the intense training that helped her win 29 Paralympic medals between 2004 (at age 12) and 2021.
She took a sisters trip to Cabo this year. She saw the vice president. If she didn’t feel like swimming on a certain day, she didn’t get into the pool.
She also took antidepressants for the first time, though she is off them now.
“It’s never really been about the medals; my identity is not in swimming, but it was wild to come back [from Tokyo] and feel like, why do I feel so weird? It was almost like no joy, like nothing satisfied me,” she said. “Swimming has always given me that confidence to take on the world as an amputee. So this past year [without swimming], I think it’s more of just such a funk. I’m slowly getting out of it since September.”
Long, 30, credited her success in Tokyo largely to moving a year before the Games from Baltimore, where she lived with her husband (married in 2019), to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. She stayed in the same dorm room where she spent four years in her late teens and early 20s.
She moved back to Baltimore after the Paralympics and is working with her childhood coach, Andrew Barranco.
Long plans to return to worlds next summer in Manchester, England, and hopes to compete in two more Paralympics, making the 2028 Los Angeles Games her farewell.
There is little that hasn’t been accomplished in the pool, though she wants to break 2:40 again in the 200m individual medley, which she won at the last four Paralympics. A back condition — Long learned before the Tokyo Games that she has an extra vertebra — affects her breaststroke.
Outside of races and times, Long’s sights are set. She just finished the cover for the children’s book she’s worked on with her dad — “The Mermaid with No Tail” — that will come out closer to the 2024 Paralympics. She hopes that her birth mom, who is Russian, can watch her compete for the first time at those Paris Games.
Back home in Baltimore, Long has 28 of her 29 medals. Most of them are locked away in a closet. One is above the fridge, should she need to grab it quickly for a public appearance or to show a guest.
“It’s dirty and gross from being dropped and chipped,” she said.
One more medal, from her Paralympic debut at age 12 in 2004, is somewhere else in storage after spending time in a museum.
As Long said, the medals are not the focus. And after the last year, her goal for the Paris Games at the moment is just to get there. The competition ramp up begins at a World Series meet in Indianapolis in April.
“That’s going to set the tone,” Long said. “I definitely know, as an athlete, what I need to do. It’s more coming to terms of starting to make those sacrifices that come with it. I think I’m ready. But, yeah, that was just a hard year.”
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Mikaela Shiffrin earned her 78th World Cup win, moving four victories shy of Lindsey Vonn‘s female career record, to open a busy stretch of races.
Shiffrin won a giant slalom in Semmering, Austria, by 13 hundredths of a second over Slovakian Petra Vlhova combining times from two runs. She built a commanding lead of 72 hundredths in the opening run.
It was her first GS win since Dec. 21, 2021, ending her longest victory drought in the discipline in more than six years (eight World Cup races since her last GS victory, with one podium in the last seven).
Vonn, who won 82 times, and Swede Ingemar Stenmark (86) are the only Alpine skiers with more World Cup victories than the 27-year-old Shiffrin.
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Vonn has repeated in interviews this year that she believes Shiffrin will break her record and last week was quoted by a German newspaper saying that she believes Shiffrin is already the best female Alpine skier in history.
Semmering holds another GS on Wednesday and a slalom on Thursday — both live on Peacock — as part of a busy stretch of eight World Cup slaloms or giant slaloms over 15 days through Jan. 10.
“The start of a weekend with three races is always a bit nerve-racking,” Shiffrin said. “You hope that you’re in the right shape and you can bring the right intensity from the start.”
In addition to her 2018 Olympic GS gold, Shiffrin has 15 World Cup GS victories, fourth in women’s history behind Swiss Vreni Schneider (20), Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll (16) and Frenchwoman Tessa Worley (16).
Shiffrin has at least one win in all four primary disciplines in 2022 — downhill, super-G, giant slalom and slalom — completing that set in one year for the first time in her career. She has four victories this season and won five of the last seven World Cup races held in Semmering dating to 2016.
ALPINE SKIING: Results | Broadcast Schedule
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