[autotag]Mariya Agapova[/autotag] created quite the buzz with her stellar UFC debut, taking home a $50,000 “Performance of the Night” bonus with a first-round victory over Hannah Cifers.
For a 23-year-old from Kazakhstan, where an average annual wage amounts to about $3,500, the money is potentially life-changing – and maybe even life-saving.
“It’s absolutely life-changing, and thankfully I have experience with these situations where somebody is as poor as anything, and then some water comes on the lettuce patch,” Agapova’s manager, Alex Davis, told MMA Junkie. “We’ll help her establish herself and use her money wisely and not spend it. She’s been biking to American Top Team from far away, and now we’ll get her a driver’s license and a car.”
Buying a car might not seem like a purchase that can assist with self-preservation, but earlier this year, Agapova was scheduled to compete at Invicta FC 39 before she had to withdraw because of injuries sustained when she was struck while riding her bike home from the gym.
“She was coming home after training, and the guy looked the wrong way and ran her over and threw her down,” Davis said. “She had a deep, deep cut in her elbow, where we could see the bone.”
The physical injuries were only part of the problem, Davis said. The chaos that followed proved similarly challenging for someone 7,000 miles from her homeland.
“Think about it: She comes all the way from Pavlodar,” Davis said. “She speaks English, but she’s not great at it, and she gets hit, and then you have the ambulances and the police and hospitals. She panicked, but we got her through it.”
In the end, everything worked out just fine, with Agapova recovering from her injuries in time to make her promotional debut at this past weekend’s UFC on ESPN 10 event, which took place at UFC Apex in Las Vegas. It’s the same facility that hosted Agopava’s fight at Dana White’s Contender Series 22 in July 2019.
That decision loss to Tracy Cortez remains the only loss of Agopova’s professional career. Davis said he knew it was a tough assignment but that it would mark only the beginning of his fighter’s journey. She has remained at American Top Team ever since, steadily gaining experience.
“We just did not have enough time to train her,” Davis said. “I was trying to train her to defend from the single-legs, which I saw that Tracy did. Mariya is like a sponge. You teach, she learns. You teach, she learns. She’s a sponge, but it just simply wasn’t enough time. I knew that given time – because I saw her sparring with Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Amanda Ribas and everybody; I saw her spar with Kayla Harrison. I knew that she was capable. It just takes time.
“Inside the gym, she is fearless. Even in those beginning days, you could see that she would not back down. She would not get submitted. She would not tap. She’s just got it.”
The world got to see a bit of that this past weekend, as well. Under the tutelage of American Top Team coaches, Davis said Agapova is a much-improved fighter over herself from one year ago.
“I’m pretty well conscious what Mariya is capable of,” Davis said. “I watched her train here. I know what she can do. I love Hannah Cifers. I really appreciate that Hannah took the fight, but I knew it was a difficult fight for Hannah because Mariya is much larger, much longer, and she’s a good boxer. She boxed before she did MMA, so I kind of expected similar.”
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Where her ceiling ultimately lies remains to be seen, but the expectations will surely rise following her scintillating debut. What she’ll ultimately accomplish, Davis can’t say for sure, but he believes she’s already on the path of gaining what’s most important.
“I think that she’s very young – she’s only 23,” Davis said. “She’s got a ton of potential. Besides her boxing, which everybody saw, it’s her attitude. She has a fearless, go-for-broke attitude in her, and it’s a question of developing and evolving.
“There’s a lot of tough girls. She has a lot of work to do in some martial arts areas, but yeah, of course, anybody that works as hard as she works and brings that fearless attitude to the ring has a very good chance to become a UFC champion, but to me, I’m not so much worried about her becoming champion as I’m worried about her changing her life. To me, that’s more important.
“It’s like with Thiago Santos from the City of God in Brazil, and we got him all the way to a title fight with Jon Jones, and I told him, ‘I want you to win, we all want you to win, but even if you lose, you’re a winner of having got here.’ To me, yeah, I want Mariya to be a champion, but to me, as important as being champion is to establish her and put both her feet down and get her where she can live a normal life.”
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