Erin Blanchfield not sweating pursuit of UFC championship history
Erin Blanchfield isn’t on a quest to be the youngest woman to win a UFC championship.
She’s pretty close to getting it done anyway.
“It was always something I could do because I started so young. I went pro at 18,” Blanchfield recently told The Post via video call. “Fighting’s hard enough. It’s kind of like unnecessary pressure. You know what I mean?
“So I really just try to focus on the fight that’s in front of me.”
Winning the championship would be enough to satisfy the 24-year-old, but last month’s victory over recent flyweight title challenger Taila Santos, coupled with the No. 2 position assigned to her in the UFC’s divisional rankings, may already have positioned her to face the winner of a rematch between champion Alexa Grasso and former longtime 125-pound queen Valentina Shevchenko.
The championship fight headlines Noche UFC on Saturday (10 p.m. ET, ESPN+).
Blanchfield (12-1, six finishes), who lives up to her “Cold Blooded” nickname with an unflappable demeanor, has done all she can to earn the next crack at the champ — whoever emerges from Las Vegas this weekend with the gold — but she’s not the only one in the mix in what has rapidly become a highly competitive weight class.
The stiffest challenge comes from Manon Fiorot, a French kickboxer who also sports a perfect 6-0 mark in UFC competition and just topped former two-time strawweight champ Rose Namajunas.
As much as Blanchfield doesn’t get caught up in numbers — such as the roughly 12 months she has to best Namajunas as the youngest-ever female UFC champ — she’s wily enough to recognize the promotional power such a possibility has and how that could help her get closer, faster to the title.
“Marketing-wise, it’s definitely smart,” Blanchfield says. “I feel like [the UFC] could definitely use that.”
But even then, Blanchfield figures the promoters will let the weekend play out and go from there.
And the Elmwood Park, N.J., native is planning to have a seat at T-Mobile Arena to see for herself how Grasso-Shevchenko 2 plays out.
Whoever ends up standing across from Blanchfield next — likely one of Grasso, Shevchenko or even Fiorot — she’s keenly aware that she’s the grappling-centric fighter in the mix with three women known best for their striking.
Not that it apparently intimidates her, though.
“I’m, like, the only grappler in the top of this division right now. It’s all strikers,” Blanchfield concedes. “But I feel like I fair well. I feel like with my threat of my takedowns combined with my ability to purely strike, I feel super confident going into it.
“And I’m always trying to improve, and I know I’ll make improvements between each fight. So yeah, I feel like I could strike with any of them.”
Blanchfield carried a three-fight streak of submission victories into the Santos fight in Singapore on Aug. 26, including a one-sided mangling on the mat of Molly McCann at Madison Square Garden last November.
But in both her victory via rear-naked choke against Jessica Andrade back in February and the outpointing of Santos nearly three weeks ago, Blanchfield showed more striking acumen than had previously been on display during her two years in the UFC.
Against ex-strawweight titleholder Andrade, Blanchfield’s right hand found a home with several powerful shots to the head, making the most of the fact that she had trouble taking down the sturdy Brazilian before securing the second-round submission.
It didn’t go as smoothly to start against Santos, whose base is in Muay Thai, and Blanchfield sported the effects of the absorbed strikes with two black eyes in the days after the victory.
As Santos tired, the opportunity opened for Blanchfield to gain the upper hand on the feet, even tagging Santos with perhaps the hardest strikes of the whole fight in the third and deciding round.
“I feel like, every fight, you can see my improvements, and I feel like I’m always trying to improve after each one too,” says Blanchfield of her growing abilities as a striker. “I think these past few fights, I’ve had to strike more because it’s been hard to get the takedown, so you’ve just been able to see my striking more, even if it was kind of already at that level.”
The fact that Blanchfield lost no steam as her opponent did by the third round bodes well for the fights to come, as championship fights will afford her five rounds to work with instead of three.
Many were surprised the Santos fight was not elevated to a five-round main event on a different cart — one not headlined by stars Max Holloway and “The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung — and Blanchfield “definitely would have loved to have five rounds.”
“I would love all my fights to be five rounds,” Blanchfield says. “I have the cardio for it, and I feel like I’d have a lot more finishes if I had five-round fights because I don’t think they’d be able to keep up with my pace.”
