Two trailblazers of modern women’s combat sports are set to step back into the cage this spring.
Former UFC champion Ronda Rousey and women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Gina Carano will meet in a featherweight contest at a May 16 MMA event at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, Most Valuable Promotions (MVP) announced Tuesday.
Rousey hasn’t fought since late in 2016 when she was stopped by Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 as she attempted to win back her bantamweight title. The Riverside, Calif., native was a lifelong judoka and won an Olympic bronze medal in judo in 2008 before beginning her MMA career and taking the sport by storm.
The 39-year-old began her MMA career in 2010 and started off 12-0 as a pro. She became a star and champion in the defunct Strikeforce organization, winning all her fights by first-round armbar, and was the inaugural UFC women’s bantamweight champion before eventually losing her belt to Holly Holm in 2015. Rousey returned 13 months later, lost to Nunes in 48 seconds, and she hasn’t been around the sport much since then.
Rousey never formally announced her retirement from MMA and has admitted in recent years that sustaining concussions throughout her career contributed to her walking away from fighting. Following her UFC run, she went on to star in several Hollywood movies and became a WWE superstar for a few years.
Before Rousey’s rise to superstardom, Carano was the face of women’s MMA and regarded as the first woman to become a major MMA star in North America.
Carano began her combat sports career competing in Muay Thai and made her MMA debut in 2006. She began her MMA career 7-0, and her fight with Julie Kedzie in 2007 made history by becoming the first women’s MMA bout to be broadcast live on national network television in the United States.
Her fight with Cris Cyborg in the summer of 2009 made more history by being the first major MMA event headlined by two women when they were featured in the main event of a Strikeforce card.
Carano was stopped by Brazil’s Cyborg, who went on to become an all-time great, and hasn’t fought professionally since her first and only loss 16.5 years ago.
Now 43, Carano has enjoyed a successful post-fighting career in show business, starring in several big-budget action movies and playing a popular recurring character in the Star Wars universe on the hit show The Mandalorian.
Carano has been away from combat sports for longer than Rousey has, but she recently returned to training. She previously trained out of Albuquerque, N.M., with famed trainer Greg Jackson, who also worked with UFC champions Georges St-Pierre, Jon Jones, Andrei Arlovski, Rashad Evans and Holly Holm, among others.
A hypothetical Rousey vs. Carano matchup has been speculated on over the years, but based on the timing and trajectories of their respective careers, it never previously made sense to pair the two together.
“Ronda came to me and said there is only one person she would make a comeback form, and it has been her dream to make this fight happen between us,” Carano said via the official press release. “She thanked me for opening up doors for her in her career and was respectful in asking for this fight to happen.
“This is an honour. I believe I will walk out of this fight with the win and I anticipate it will not come easy, which I welcome. This is as much for Ronda and me as it is for the fans and mixed martial arts community. What a time to be alive.”
The event will be professionally sanctioned in the state of California under the Unified Rules of MMA. Rousey vs. Carano will be scheduled for five, five-minute rounds, contested in the 145-pound division. The athletes will wear four-ounce MMA gloves, and the cage will have a hexagonal shape, just like the Strikeforce cage in which Rousey and Carano used to compete.
This will be the first MMA event held by MVP, which was co-founded by Jake Paul in 2021 and has exclusively promoted boxing events since its debut.
“MVP has always been driven by disruption and delivering the biggest moments in combat sports on a global scale, and today we are officially bringing that energy to MMA for the first time,” Paul stated in the press release. “Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano are the two most formative figures in the history of women’s MMA; they are the icons who shattered the glass ceiling and helped build the foundation this sport stands on. MVP’s conviction in women’s boxing was driven by the success achieved by Ronda Rousey, who was the biggest star of the entire sport of MMA during her career.”
MVP will host a Rousey vs. Carano Kickoff Press Conference on March 5 at the Intuit Dome. No other matchups have been announced for the May 16 card at this time, but the lineup is expected to be filled out in the coming weeks.
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