Former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey only needed 17 seconds to finish women’s mixed marital arts pioneer Gina Carano at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. on Saturday.
The two met in the featured fight of Most Valuable Promotions and Netflix’s debut MMA event. It was Rousey’s return to the sport after nearly a decade away. It had been nearly 17 years since Carano had made the walk to the cage. It was difficult to know what to expect but ended like everyone thought it would.
Rousey quickly took Carano down and “Conviction” was tapping out to Rousey’s signature armbar seconds later. It was revealed following the event that Rousey entered her return bout with an injury.
“She should share with you the injury that she had two and a half weeks ago. If people were paying attention after the open workouts, she was limping,” said Most Valuable Promotions’ co-founder Nakisa Bidarian during the MVP MMA 1 Post-Fight Press Conference. “She’s a warrior. I didn’t know about it until Wednesday when I saw that and she said, ‘I eat injuries for breakfast. I got this.'”
Rousey was asked about the injury when she joined the press conference and detailed what happened.
“I sprained my ankle or foot pretty bad like two and a half weeks ago,” Rousey confirmed. “Right when it happened, I’m like, we had two and a half weeks left and I’m like, ”Well, looks like I’m doing this with my ankle messed up.’ But basically I’ve never had a fight where I wasn’t injured in some way, you know? I didn’t ever pull out of a fight because I’d never been injured. I just never pulled out of a fight because I always fight anyway. That’s just part of it, and when I happened, I’m like, ‘This is part of it and I’m the f**king best at this.’ I pushed through.”