Kayla Harrison always knew the battle with the scale for UFC 316 would be the toughest yet. And she almost didn’t make it.
In Saturday’s co-main event in Newark, N.J., Harrison completed her climb to the mountaintop in dominant fashion, submitting Julianna Peña in the third round to become UFC bantamweight champion. The two-time Olympic judo gold medalist entered the title fight as a huge favorite despite being the challenger, and she didn’t disappoint as she grounded Peña with her expert grappling and was rarely in danger.
One of the biggest questions heading into Saturday was whether Harrison could make championship weight. She had previously won a pair of PFL tournaments as a featherweight and in her two UFC appearances, she needed to make use of the one-pound allowance for not-title bouts. However, on Friday, she hit 135 pounds on the dot.
It wasn’t easy.
“I would have chopped off my leg to make it to this fight,” Harrison said at the evening’s post-fight press conference. “There are moments in your life where you have a choice, right? You have a choice to say, ‘I quit,’ or you have a choice to dig in your heels and Thursday night was definitely one of those moments for me where I really wanted to be anywhere else on Earth than in that sauna.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it sucks ass. It’s not pretty, but it’s in those moments when you’re true character comes out and you’re forged and I’ve been forged in the fire, literally. [UFC CEO] Dana [White] and I were joking about it, I might be unbreakable. You can’t kill me, I’m kind of like a cockroach, you can’t get rid of me. And again, I give all of that to God. He’s made me a hell of a weapon.”
Harrison mentioned the weight-cutting issues in her post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, going as far as to say that she thought she might not make it to the scale when she was shedding the last few pounds Thursday evening. But her team pushed her through and now, seven years into her pro fighting career, she is a UFC champion.
“I think it says a lot more about my faith and my team than it says about me,” Harrison said. “I’m strong, but I’m not very strong by myself. I talk about it a lot, but that last pound, specifically this time the last two pounds, that was God and that was the team that he’s put around me.
“That was all of my coaches keeping me positive, encouraging me, my weight-cut specialist Eric Pena. I really wanted to give up and I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ God and my team and Him putting them in my life is what I attribute that to. I don’t know, I guess I’m just built different when it comes to all the other stuff.”
Up next for Harrison is a matchup with all-time great Amanda Nunes, her former training partner at American Top Team in Florida. Harrison used her post-fight mic time to call out Nunes, who was seated cageside and permitted to enter the cage for a faceoff.
For the most part, the two have expressed nothing but respect and admiration for each other and it was assumed Nunes was coming back from retirement specifically to challenge Harrison should she win at UFC 316.
When Nunes hung up the gloves in 2023, she did so having won 14 of her last 15 fights with multiple title defenses at both 135 and 145 pounds. Harrison once mused that it would be great to fight Nunes twice, with one of her belts on the line each time, but now she is just eager to jump on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I have no idea, but I’m open to—I just want to fight,” Harrison said when asked if she still thinks they could fight for the featherweight title as well. “I just want to fight. I definitely want to fight Amanda. She’s the greatest of all time, I want to be the greatest of all time, I’ve wanted that for a long time now. It’s not personal, there’s no bad blood. I don’t care what weight we fight at. I walk around at a hundred and—I’m not even going to tell you guys what I walk around at. Never mind.”
