Valentina Shevchenko Explains Why she Doesn’t Plan on Retiring
Valentina Shevchenko doesn’t have any defined focus on hanging up the gloves and has a line of logic behind why she approaches her combat sports efforts in that way. This was mentioned during an interview that the reigning UFC flyweight champion did on The Ariel Helwani Show following her most recent title defense. Shevchenko put on a dominant showing against former strawweight champion Zhang Weili in the co-main event of UFC 322 and shut out the dominant Chinese combatant.
The legacy of the multi-time titleholder at 125 pounds is already galvanized, but that being said, ‘Bullet’ isn’t looking to close off her career and frame her residual legacy in a certain way. Touching on how MMA is more of a lifestyle-minded thing for her and not about framing the narrative of her story in a certain way, Shevchenko said,
“I’m still an active fighter and I don’t know what’s gonna be next, what I will face next year, how far I can go. So for me it’s still a living process. I never stop. You can answer this question when you are done—done with everything. You look back and start to see. But even then, life is still can bring so much more and you never know when and where it’s gonna turn. You just do what you think is right and you don’t pretend to be someone else.”
Valentina Shevchenko fires back at critics of her uFC 322 performance
Valentina Shevchenko secured a huge win on points over Zhang Weili, but some onlookers didn’t care for the way she went about securing the win. The grappling-centric focus with a lot of position-oriented work didn’t stoke the fires of certain fans, but Shevchenko also took time to respond to those detractors of her performance at Madison Square Garden.
The exemplary UFC champion mentioned during the same post-fight interview with Helwani that fighters cannot be good for everybody and that certain fighters will have styles that don’t draw out excited reactions from onlookers. Shevchenko mentioned that she is not mad at anyone for having differing opinions from hers and quipped that some of these detractors were simply in the camp of people who didn’t understand martial arts.
