Diego Lopes experienced the best and the worst of fight night at UFC 306.
The featherweight contender’s own bout couldn’t have gone better as he won a convincing unanimous decision over the highly ranked Brian Ortega on Saturday’s main card. Unfortunately for Lopes, he had to deal with a major disappointment as one fight later he was in Alexa Grasso’s corner serving as a coach for her flyweight championship loss to Valentina Shevchenko.
Grasso lost a listless decision to Shevchenko, with her poor performance bringing an anticlimactic end to her trilogy with “Bullet.” At the evening’s post-fight press conference, Lopes couldn’t pinpoint exactly what went wrong for his teammate.
“I think Alexa froze and wasn’t in the fight tonight,” Lopes said. “Valentina didn’t do much either. What did she do? She just took her to the ground and tried to control her there. Didn’t do any damage, she didn’t do anything either.”
It was obvious by Lopes’ demeanor that he muted his own celebration at the post-fight press conference in the wake of Grasso’s championship defeat. However, it wasn’t just seeing the flyweight title change hands that soured Lopes’ mood.
Touted as a celebration of Mexican Independence Day weekend, UFC 306 saw a number of Mexican-born fighters fall flat, including Daniel Zellhuber, Irene Aldana, and the heavily favored Yazmin Jauregui. Lopes would have loved to have seen his fellow countrymen share in his success.
“I’m a little bit upset about all the Mexicans who lost the fight tonight,” Lopes said. “Obviously, I’m happy with my win, but I wanted more Mexicans to win. But this is the toughest sport in the world. You can’t always get what you want, so yeah, I’m a bit upset about that.”
Lopes has no regrets about having to rush to prepare for Grasso’s title fight after his own bout concluded and he looks forward to going over Grasso’s performance when the post-UFC 306 madness has settled down.
“I really want to support everyone from my team, so I made sure I wanted to be there for Alexa,” Lopes said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get the win tonight and I wasn’t able to speak with her because I was brought up here for all my media commitments, but I’m looking forward to speaking with her after this.”
