The 2017 championship fight between Holly Holm (10-2, 7 KO) and Germaine de Randamie (7-3, 4 KO) will not only be the main event of UFC 208, but also inaugurate the featherweight division of women’s fighting.
The February 11 bout at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, will give Holm an opportunity to capture her second UFC title and stop her two-fight losing streak at the hands of Miesha Tate (UFC 196, March 2016) and Valentina Schevchenko, which she fough in June of this year.
Holm’s popularity grew enormously after she defeated Ronda Rousey for the women’s bantamweight championship at UFC 193 on November 2013.
She is trying to become the fourth UFC fighter to win a belt in two different categories after Randy Couture, BJ Penn y Conor McGregor.
De Randamie reaches this fight after winning two in a row and an overall 3-1 UFC record. Since her defeat at the hands of Amanda Nunes in November 2013, the 32-year-old Dutch defeated Larissa Pacheco on March 2015 at UFC 185 in Dallas and Anna Elmose in the Netherlands on May 8 of this year. Both those fight were won via KO.
This will be the third category in women’s UFC after bantamweight and strawweight. The winner of this fight will most likely face Cris Cyborg, who rejected to fight both Holm and Randamie because she is still recovering from the weight loss she had to endure for her fight against Lina Lansberg.
The event, which will take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, will also feature the following fights:
Glover Teixeira vs. Jared Cannonier, Travis Browne vs. Derrick Lewis, Ian McCall vs. Neil Seery, Ryan LaFlare vs. Roan Carneiro, George Sullivan vs. Randy Brown, Marcin Tybura vs. Luis Henrique, Nik Lentz vs. Islam Makhachev, Wilson Reis vs. Ulka Sasaki and Dustin Poirier vs. Jim Miller.
