A year has passed since Virna Jandiroba finally challenged for the UFC strawweight title, and she sees the sport with different eyes now.
Jandiroba and her UFC Vegas 124 opponent, Tatiana Suarez, have both come up short in attempts to win the 115-pound championship, losing decisions to Mackenzie Dern and Zhang Weili, respectively. Both have bounced back with dominant victories since. They collide in the co-main event of UFC Vegas 124 on Saturday, and Jandiroba wonders she fits in the title picture
having fought and lost to Dern twice already.
“I’m also at a point in my career where I just want to fight,” Jandiroba told MMA Fighting. “I don’t have 10 fights left in my career anymore, I have a few more, so I want to fight and express myself, enjoy these moments. I know I have a few more fights left in my career, and soon I’ll be retiring.
“The belt is the moon, you know? But if I don’t reach it, I’ll land among the stars. I want to have good fights, express myself. There’s always an idealized vision of where I wanted to go as a martial artist. I don’t think I’ll reach my ideal, but I want to get very close to it, and that’s good enough for me.”
Dern won a pair of decisions against Jandiroba, meaning that three of Jandiroba’s four UFC losses came against former or future champions. Now 9-4 in the UFC and having beaten most of the other ranked 115-pounders, “Carcara” remains confident that a Dern trilogy could be on the horizon for 2027 if she gets by Suarez.
“It’s pretty confusing,” Jandiroba said of the current landscape of the division. “Weili Zhang hasn’t said anything, so I’m assuming for now that she won’t be coming back. I think the fight with Tatiana is a very fair matchup for both of us.
“We’re very close in the rankings, and I think whoever gets through this fight deserves another title shot. Tatiana has never fought Mackenzie, I’ve already fought her, but it’s a fair matchup, especially my fight with Mackenzie, which was very close. I’m not the one who makes those decisions, but I think this could be a title eliminator.”
Suarez and Jandiroba have twice been scheduled to fight in the past. An ACL injury forced the Brazilian out of their 2023 clash and straight to surgery, and the following year had to deal with an “obscure” change with Suarez withdrawing from their bout and instead being granted a title shot against Zhang.
Suarez lost, but rebounded with back-to-back wins over Amanda Lemos and Loopy Godinez. Jandiroba has also beaten both Lemos and Godinez in the UFC, but won’t rely on pure and simple MMA math to predict Saturday’s outcome.
“MMA is not an exact science, but when you have a fight to use as a reference, it’s really good to look at,” Jandiroba said. “Loopy Godinez, I was coming back from surgery and was being very conservative in that fight. So, yes, you can compare them, but you can’t compare Virna. I wasn’t the same Virna back then, you know? I wasn’t the same Virna I am now, or even the Virna I was one fight later.
“But there’s the Amanda fight. I know Amanda is strong, that’s fine, and I think Amanda defended her takedowns well. But overall, I also think she dominated Amanda. But that’s it, there’s no exact equation. I’ll only know when I get there on Saturday because every fight is different, there’s no way around it.”
“We had more footage to work with,” she continued. “Watching her fight other girls like Weili Zhang gave us the opportunity to see a lot of openings. I was able to see more of Tatiana. We probably always improve throughout our careers, so I imagine she had improved by the time of that fight with Weili Zhang, but I have also changed a lot since that fight we were supposed to have.”
