Hey Canada! 😃 pic.twitter.com/7ah0IFQAa4
— danawhite (@danawhite)
April 7, 2023
The Ultimate Fighting Championship is officially
going back to Canada this year.
On Friday, UFC President Dana White – who was caught on video
slapping his wife on Dec. 31, 2022 – announced
on social media that UFC
289 will be held at the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada. White then told Canadian outlet TSN
that the main attraction for that show would be the rubber match
between Amanda
Nunes (22-5) and Julianna
Pena (11-5) for the women’s bantamweight throne. Other matches
recently
booked for the card include Hakeem
Dawodu (13-3-1) vs. Lucas
Almeida (14-1) at featherweight, and Aiemann
Zahabi (9-2) vs. Qileng Aori
(24-9) in the bantamweight division.
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The promotion had been rumored to instead be holding the card at
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, but due to the playoff picture for the
NHL team Calgary Flames, the Scotiabank Saddledome may not have
been available for the promotion on June 10. Instead, the league
took to the last Canadian venue that put up the UFC, in Vancouver,
back in September 2019.
Nunes won the rematch against Pena in July 2022 to win back her
belt, exacting revenge after suffering a shocking submission loss
at the end of 2021 to “The Venezuelan Vixen.” The defeat for Nunes
snapped a 12-fight win streak that saw her claim titles in two
divisions, while beating nearly every woman that ever held the
strap at both of those two weight categories. As the lone
two-division champ in UFC women’s history, Nunes set or at one time
held a number of records among the female divisions, including the
most wins, championship victories, stoppages, first-round finishes
and total title defenses.
Pena’s upset at UFC 269 in 2021 stacks up among the greatest in UFC
history, but it was a feat she could not replicate when they met
over seven months later. Instead, Nunes gave her opponent no chance
to get anything going, with a pillar-to-post beating that earned a
50-43 card from one judge. Leading up her first encounter with
Nunes, Pena was only on a one-fight win streak, having taped
Sara
McMann earlier in 2021 to earn the crack at gold. A great deal
of inactivity has plagued the career of the Sikjitsu product, who
will be entering into just her 11th UFC bout after nearly 10 years
with the company.
UFC 289 will go down inside of the Rogers Arena in Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada. While the headliner is Nunes vs. Pena 3,
the remainder of the main card has not yet been set. Expected
matchups for the pay-per-view portion of the billing include a
welterweight tilt pitting Stephen
Thompson against Michel
Pereira and a featherweight scrap between Dan Ige and
Nate
Landwehr. It is unclear if another championship bout will join
the lineup.