UFC: Joanna Jedrzejczyk puts off retirement in pursuit of reclaiming title – ‘I can’t stop, I won’t stop’
- Former strawweight champ reveals she contemplated hanging up gloves after ‘maybe one, two, three more fights’
- ‘[There will be] lots of pain, lots of tears, lots of blood, sacrificing myself, but it’s worth it to step into the UFC Octagon and fight for the belt’
The reports of Joanna Jedrzejczyk’s retirement are greatly exaggerated.
The former UFC strawweight champion, who just turned 33, recently caused a great deal of speculation about her fighting future by using the hashtag “#33andretired” in an Instagram post.
As it turns out, however, she’s not hanging up the gloves yet.
“I will be fighting,” Jedrzejczyk told SCMP MMA from a newly bought home in her native Poland. “I can’t stop. I won’t stop. I was thinking, ‘maybe I’ll do one, two, three more fights,’ but why not fight every year? Even if I do it once a year or twice a year, why not do it? I love it. It doesn’t matter if I keep winning or losing or keep fighting for the title or not, I just love it.”
“I see things differently,” she added. “People give me so much energy and strength. I just want to do it for my fans all over the world.”
Jedrzejczyk has not fought since March, when she came up short in an all-out war with reigning UFC strawweight champion Zhang Weili. While she recognises the next shot at Zhang’s title will probably go to her former foil Rose Namajunas, she’s hopeful that she might get a crack at the winner of that match-up sometime in 2021.