5 Times Yoel Romero stunned UFC fans with his explosive abilities inside the Octagon
A major star for the UFC for the best part of a decade, Cuban Middleweight Yoel Romero is considered one of the best fighters to never win a UFC title. The Olympic silver medallist in Greco-Roman wrestling has a chance to change that when he takes on Israel Adesanya for the UFC Middleweight Championship at UFC 248 this weekend, and to pull it off, he’ll need to give one of his best performances to date.
Thankfully, ‘Soldier of God’ is used to delivering under pressure and today we look at 5 times that he stunned UFC fans with his Octagon performances.
#1 Debuting with a bang in 2013
Back in 2013, when the StrikeForce promotion was closed and its roster introduced into the UFC, Yoel Romero wasn’t one of the fighters that most fans were clamoring to see inside the Octagon. After all, the Cuban had only had one fight under the StrikeForce banner – a TKO loss to Rafael Feijao at 205lbs – and with just 5 professional fights to his name at the age of nearly 36, he hardly felt like a red-hot prospect to watch.
That all changed in his fight with the unheralded Clifford Starks. Making his debut at Middleweight, it was clear that Romero was an unbelievable athletic specimen, looking like he’d been carved from stone, and it didn’t take him long at all to carve Starks’ head up with a ridiculous flying knee that made it look like ‘Soldier of God’ had been launched from a cannon.
A few follow-up punches sealed the deal, and Romero had his first UFC win in astounding fashion. Despite the fight being on the preliminary card, it ensured that nobody would take the Cuban lightly again; he was now a man to firmly keep an eye on.