The women’s bantamweight title changed hands at UFC 316 on June 7 in Newark, New Jersey. Kayla Harrison dethroned former two-time titleholder Julianna Pena in the fight card’s co-main event at the Prudential Center.
Harrison secured a submission win via kimura late in the second round to add a UFC championship to her two Olympic gold medals and championships in the Professional Fighters League (PFL). Pena revealed that she entered the fight with Harrison with several injuries.
“I was plagued with several injuries leading up to that fight and it was not a good camp for me in that sense because I knew that I was going into the fight with a pretty severe handicap,” Pena said on The Ariel Helwani Show.
The nagging injuries weren’t severe enough for Pena to pull out of the fight, but she considered it.
“It crossed my mind but it wasn’t bad enough to the point where I would have to not fight because I knew I was going to be able to push through,” She said. “But, I think it’s a funny thing where my coaches didn’t explain the severity of the situation to me because otherwise I probably would have thought more heavily on not competing.”
Pena doesn’t have any regrets about not backing out of the fight. She had put in too much work to not make the walk to the octagon.
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“I don’t regret competing. I put in too much time. I taken away too much time from other people: from my daughters, from my coaches, from their families. So, I don’t regret competing,” Pena said. “I just wish I could have competing under better circumstances.”
Pena detailed her injuries and will be going into surgery next month to address some of them.
“About the second week of May, I broke my thumb on my training partner, and it was swollen,” Peña revealed. “It looked like someone hit me in the hand with a hammer, and it was really difficult to grip. It still is right now very difficult to grip and to have grip strength.
“But then the 29th of May, I took a really bad fall in the octagon, and I tore my elbow and broke off a ton of bone chips so that I wasn’t able to straighten my arm or bend my arm fully. I worked on that for a few days before I left to fight week, but everyday it was just worse and worse and worse.”
