Valentina Shevchenko Makes History: First UFC Champ to Earn All 8 Rubies, Leaving Alex Pereira and Islam Makhachev Behind

Valentina Shevchenko re-claimed her lost belt with a dominant performance over Alexa Grasso at UFC 306. With this win, the Kyrgyz fighter has now leaped over light heavyweight champion, Alex Pereira, and lightweight champion, Islam Makhachev, earning eight rubies on her belt.

A ruby is added to a fighter’s belt instead of giving them a new belt after each title defense and ‘The Bullet’ Shevchenko is the first champion in the history of the promotion to have had 8!

Sharing her excitement with The Schmo , flyweight champion mentioned that she had given away her belt for updating, and would soon receive the new belt plate with all eight stones.

To put this into context, Islam has four stones on his lightweight gold while the light heavyweight champion, ‘Poatan’ Pereira has three on his.

Despite this, her latest trilogy fight against Grasso, also the promotion’s first in the women’s division, received a lot of criticism for being a bit lackluster.

It’s now been a few weeks since but the the champ has finally responded to the naysayers, simply labeling all their words as “propaganda”.

Shevchenko goes off propagandist haters

The Shevchenko-Grasso affair has finally come to an end after three epic fights.

While the first outing got the best of the Kyrgyz fighter with Grasso submitting the champion with a rear naked choke, their second outing ended in a draw.

But Valentina was game for the final one. Having honed her skills in wrestling, ‘The Bullet’ took her opponent to deep waters and re-claimed her belt with a UD win.

This however wasn’t what the fandom hoped to see – a ground-heavy co-main event at the biggest stage (The Sphere). Soon, online fans expressed their displeasure and so did other fighters. In fact, former middleweight champion, Israel Adesanya, even posted a video of him falling asleep during the co-main event of the evening.

In response to these, Shevchenko following her win shared her thoughts with MMA Fighting.

“I feel like it’s, when (the UFC) constantly over the year, they’re showing the best moments of one fighter and don’t show anything from another fighter, the people don’t watch the full fight they just see the small clips and they just hear and repeat it, this is kind of how propaganda works.”

Furthermore, she went one step further by claiming that there is something terribly wrong with the world when fellow fighters can’t recognize a full MMA skillset. What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.