Amanda Nunez will not retire to try and get her belt back at the UFC.
“Liones” is scheduled to be directed to the UFC Hall of Fame in late June, and by then she should already know who is standing over the octagon for her return fight. Julianna Peña defends her belt and Kayla Harrison on June 8th at UFC 316 Lands.
Nunes, a former two-division UFC champion, retired in June 2023 after dominating Irene Aldana. She joined UFC 314 in Miami and said on the UFC Fight Pass Brazil broadcast that she was “ready for war.”
“It’s not for me to look at things from the outside and see my belt there,” Nunes said, referring to Peña’s belt at a UFC 316 press conference in Miami. “That belt is just a fantasy, something real is coming back home with me, and that just motivates me.
Nunes said this wasn’t just one. In fact, she will win the 135 pound championship and defend it. The Brazilian first won UFC Gold in July 2016, halting Miesha Tate at the UFC 200 and defended three times against Ronda Rousey, Valentina Shevchenko and Raquel Pennington before moving to featherweight for a historic knockout via Cyborg. In total, Nunes went 11-1 in the title match in seven years, revenging his only loss to Pena.
“Kayla or Juliana, I want to get the belt back, and I’ll fight for it,” Nunes said. “I’m driven by challenges. I like to fight for something. Kayla is strong like hell, that’s what I want. It’s Juliana, cool.
Harrison is the gym who trained for the American top team in Florida and turned Nunes into a UFC champion, and “Liones” is openly said that she was one of the main reasons why she left the team.
“Of course I was troubled by the whole situation,” Nunes told the MMA battle in 2022. “When I arrived at the top team in America, I had no girls. I was the first woman to have two belts and have a women’s team in history. Territories.” Even though we shared the same coach, I was training with Mike Brown.
Nunes left ATT shortly after losing to Peña and ruled her to regain the title a few months in 2022. In an interview with the UFC Fight Pass team on Saturday, Nunes discussed past training sessions with Florida’s Harrison.
“We didn’t have a partnership at the gym,” Nunes said. “It wasn’t like that, but we trained everywhere. I was feeling unwell. I was always traveling, coming back, training. I was always training (with) and I was not in shape or training with Kela. It was always random.