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Alternative career path in MMA

The mixed martial arts (MMA) event One Fighting Championship (One FC) is trying to accommodate fighters who have only seen limited careers within the sport they had focused on for years

Irawaty Wardany (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, July 25, 2013 Published on Jul. 25, 2013 Published on 2013-07-25T11:26:19+07:00

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T

he mixed martial arts (MMA) event One Fighting Championship (One FC) is trying to accommodate fighters who have only seen limited careers within the sport they had focused on for years.

By gathering all martial artists from various disciplines around Asia, One FC has made MMA a rapidly growing sport.

Established in 2011, One FC now claims to be the biggest and longest running MMA event in Asia with several events held in major cities.

Victor Cui, One FC CEO talked to Indonesian journalists on Wednesday, saying that there was a very strong foundation for a lot of martial arts such as Muay Thai (Thai kick boxing), silat (Indonesian martial art), kungfu, wushu and many others in Indonesia and Asia as a whole.

'€œAll of those guys are fantastic athletes and now they want to make a career out of those sports and they'€™re looking at MMA'€.

'€œWe have scouts all across Asia that continue to look for fighters, but we also have exclusive partnerships with all main gyms in Asia that continue promoting their fighters to One FC. We are trying to give the right match-ups for each fighter,'€ Cui explained during his visit to Jakarta.

Most of the martial artists, he said, only knew sporting events such as the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games or Asian Games to showcase of their skills.

'€œWhen the SEA Games are over, there is nothing there for them to do. Those people need to go on to the next stage of their careers. They wear their medals to work and nobody knows who they are, but those guys have been training for years to get that medal. One FC is a professional event for them to move up to,'€ Cui said.

Almost similar to boxing, MMA is also divided into nine divisions based on weight of the athletes namely flyweight (57 kg), bantamweight (61 kg), featherweight (70 kg), welterweight (77 kg), middleweight (84 kg), light heavyweight (93 kg), heavyweight (120 kg) and super heavyweight (over 120 kg)

Indonesian people, Cui said, had started to develop a strong interest in MMA considering the soaring number of MMA gyms from only 8 in 2012 to more than 40 this year.

The Sept. 13 event will see 10 fights with two Indonesian martial artists national gold medalist Vincent Madjid, who will fight against Malaysia'€™s Euginio Tan and Max Metino, a Brazilian Jiujitsu athlete, whose opponent has yet to be determined.

The event will be broadcasted in over 70 countries around the globe with over 1 billion potential viewers.

Fightcard

'€¢ Shinichi Kojima vs Andrew Leone
'€¢ Kotetsu Boku vs Vuyisile Colossa
'€¢ Jake Butler vs James Kouame
'€¢ Bruno Pucci vs Bashir Ahmad
'€¢ Vincent Majid vs Eugenio Tan

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