After developing brief in his first two flyweight appearances beneath the UFC banner, Kai Asakura is able to attempt his hand at bantamweight.
Stepping straight right into a 125-pound title struggle in his promotional debut final December, Asakura suffered a brutal second-round submission loss in opposition to reigning flyweight king Alexandre Pantoja at UFC 310. Eight months later, he’d suffer a similar fate in his sophomore look in opposition to Tim Elliott.
Now, the previous RIZIN champion is making the transfer as much as 135 in a bid to proper the ship and at last get again into the win column.
“I’m going to maneuver up a weight class, so I’m going to have to arrange correctly and get my physique in form once more,” Asakura confirmed on YouTube. “It may be subsequent yr or so, however I’ll undoubtedly win my subsequent struggle. It’s not as a result of somebody instructed me to, however as a result of I’ve all the time carried out issues based mostly alone instincts. I need to win.”
It’s unclear if the load reduce was beginning to turn out to be a problem for Asakura at flyweight, but when the purpose is to get a win contained in the Octagon, he couldn’t have picked a harder division to attempt to do it.
Apart from the division’s reigning titleholder, Merab Dvalishvili, the UFC’s 125-pound weight class is chock-full of world-class expertise, together with Dagestani sensation Umar Nurmagomedov, the all the time explosive ‘Sugar’ Sean O’Malley, perennial and surging contenders Petr Yan and Music Yadong, and rising top-10 standout Mario Bautista.
Who would you prefer to see Asakura face in his bantamweight debut?
