In the end, Carlos Condit came out looking exactly as we all remembered him—victorious, and spattered in his opponent’s blood.
Condit made short and gory work of Thiago Alves on Saturday at UFC Fight Night 67, forcing the ringside doctor to stop their main event fight after the second round due to Alves’ broken nose. It was victory No. 30 of Condit’s professional career, improved on his gaudy 93 percent finishing rate and reaffirmed his position as one of the welterweight division’s deadliest technicians.
So, pretty much the same-old, same-old for the Natural Born Killer.
Despite returning from 14 months off after suffering a serious knee injury in a fight against Tyron Woodley last March, Condit entered still clinging to the No. 4 spot in the UFC’s official 170-pound rankings. While that lofty standing didn’t offer much room for upward mobility, an impressive showing against Alves puts him very much back in the thick of a revamped title picture.
For a few uncertain moments there, Condit’s standing wasn’t quite so clear.
It took him a round to find his range against the shorter but more powerful Alves. Their first five minutes together were hotly contested, with Alves landing several of his trademark hard low kicks. Condit’s normal high volume of strikes was on display, but the intensity that had paced him to a 29-8 overall record (6-4 UFC) since 2002 was noticeably lacking.
Perhaps he needed to knock off some rust, or maybe that first round was just a scouting expedition. Condit began the second more aggressively, and he dropped Alves with a beautiful left elbow roughly a minute into the stanza. It marked the beginning of the end for the 31-year-old Brazilian.
“After the feeling-out process I just started thinking about different things that we had worked on,” Condit told UFC play-by-play announcer Jon Anik in the cage when it was over. “We put together a lot of different tools, a lot of tactics. The first thing I threw that we had worked on, it really worked.”
Alves offered no quit, even after it was clear Condit had broken his nose. His career, too, had been plagued by recent inactivity, but he was coming off a TKO win over Jordan Mein at UFC 183 in January. A victory over Condit here would’ve been just as meaningful—if not more—for him.
It could’ve given him renewed momentum—something Alves hasn’t really enjoyed since he fought Georges St-Pierre for the welterweight title at UFC 100 in 2010. Counting that loss, Alves came in just 4-4 in his last eight fights, and prior to 2014, he had sat out two full years owing to a laundry list of injuries and rehab efforts.
Though Condit pinned him against the fence and began raining a potpourri of strikes on his already bloody face, Alves managed to work his way to his feet not once, but twice. He briefly threatened Condit with a standing guillotine choke and continued to trade punches and kicks as best he could.
But Condit stung him again with a right hand and then a highlight-reel spinning elbow. He took Alves down with a bit less than two minutes left and did it again just before the end of the round.
“I knew he was hurt,” Condit said at the postfight press conference, via Sherdog.com’s Tristen Chritchfield. “I hurt (his nose) on the first rising elbow, and then I hurt it again on the spinning back elbow. I could just feel the fight drain out of him after I hit him that first time.”
Alves seemed game to continue, but he also didn’t protest too loudly when the ringside doctor in Goiania, Brazil told his corner he couldn’t go on. It made for a bit of an anticlimactic end to an otherwise great fight, but it was the right move to protect the fighter from further damage.
One of the last times we saw Alves, he was watching the big screen in the arena, turning his head from one side to the other, trying to get a look at the sudden, unscheduled left-hand turn in the middle of his face.
For Condit, the win proves he is still a player in the suddenly volatile welterweight division. After losing his interim UFC title to St-Pierre in 2012 and dropping his next bout to future champ Johny Hendricks at UFC 158, it might have been tempting to think we’d already seen his high watermark in the Octagon.
But St-Pierre’s sudden departure from the sport at the end of 2013 effectively gave new life to everyone at 170-pounds and Condit is just now getting around to making good on it. Hendricks won the title at UFC 171—the same event where Condit was injured—but during the time Condit was out rehabbing his knee, Hendricks lost the championship in a rematch with Robbie Lawler.
Lawler will now defend the title against Rory MacDonald at UFC 189 in July (also a rematch), and Condit joins Hendricks and Woodley waiting to see who emerges with the belt. Regardless if it is Lawler or MacDonald, Condit likely now stands just one more win away from his own No. 1 contender status.
Not bad for your first night back at work in more than a year.
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