Germaine De Randamie and Michael Bisping have both stated they won’t defend their titles against known steroid cheats. Some say these champions are taking a stance, others say they are avoiding fights.
Plenty of fighters have been avoided over the years, but the names mentioned in this article take things to a new level. Some of these fighters weren’t just avoided, attempts were made to discredit them and remove them from the sport altogether. That’s how badly fighters wanted to avoid these savages.
Avoiding fights is more prevalent in boxing than it is in MMA, so for a boxer to appear on this list, there had to be an organized effort to prevent them from fighting. If we threw on every Gennady Golovkin in history who claims a champion ducked his challenge, this article would be all modern day boxers. The boxers on this list have far greater claims to having been ducked than any modern day fighter.
The standard for MMA fighters is less strict, but not by much. For an MMA fighter to appear on this list there has to have been an organized effort to prevent them from getting fights.
We will start with one of the most controversial MMA fighters of all time:
5. Fallon Fox
Controversial trans-gendered fighter, Fallon Fox, has been unable to find a fight in almost 3 years. After what her last opponent said about her, she may never find an opponent ever again.
Fox told reporters in 2013 that she had been born male. This caused quite a stir, as this had not been disclosed before her first 2 professional fights.
There is debate as to whether having gone through puberty as a biological male gives a post-op transgendered female an advantage over cis-gendered females. Currently, athletic commissions and the Olympic committee allow post-op transgendered females to compete with cisgendered females provided they have been on hormone therapy for a certain amount of time. Some believe that in combat sports these standards are set too low, and that male puberty is irreversible, giving transgendered females an advantage.
Current UFC fighter, Ashlee Evans-Smith, is a badass who turns away from no challenge. She knew about the controversy regarding Fox, fought her anyway, and won. Smith TKO’d Fox on October 12th 2013. She is the only woman to ever defeat Fox.
Fox’s last fight was in the fall of 2014. In that bout she gave a concussion and a broken orbital bone to Tamikka Banks, who had this to say about her opponent that night:
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right,”
