Ben Askren and Henry Cejudo both suffered recent RAF defeats, but Askren feels like his fellow MMA champion let himself down.
Askren and Cejudo are both retired from MMA, with Askren having last fought in 2019 and Cejudo in 2025, with Cejudo ending his career in an 0-4 slump after returning from a three-year hiatus. As impressive as Cejudo looked against Dvalishvili to start, Askren is disappointed he couldn’t finish the job.
“I will say—and I would say this to Henry, I haven’t spoken to him—but man, I had a lung transplant so I think I’ve got an excuse for getting really tired, but my man got really tired,” Askren said on The MightyCast with Demetrious Johnson. “He needs to have a good excuse for that because he got so tired he was having a hard time standing on his feet in the third period.”
The final score of the Dvalishvili vs. Cejudo bout was 11-8, a disappointing finish for the Olympic gold medalist and former two-division UFC champion. That was Dvalishvili’s second combat sports win over Cejudo after Dvalishvili also defeated him by decision at UFC 298 in 2024. They are set for a third meeting at RAF 12 on Aug. 22.
Askren hopes that Cejudo is better prepared for a long contest after it looked like he expected to put Dvalishvili away quickly.
“But you’ve got to get a few sessions in,” Askren said. “You’re going to agree to wrestle, you’ve got to get in there and train a little bit. He was as elite as it gets. I think, here’s my guess, Henry says, ‘I don’t need to train. I’m an Olympic champion. I’m going to go put him away.’ And he did, in fact, almost put him away.
“He needed two more points and the match was over. I think he probably thought, ‘Hey, I’m going to get on top once,’ because getting on top in freestyle, if you don’t know freestyle, you’re not going to turn anyway. But if you know freestyle and they don’t know freestyle, you should just go boom boom boom boom boom and Henry turned him, I think, maybe three times and all he needed was one more turn and the match was over. So I think he probably thought, ‘I’m going to go get on top one time, I’m going to boom boom boom, four turns, that’s eight points, match is going to be over.’”
Askren, a two-time NCAA Division-I wrestling champion, knows firsthand how challenging RAF competition can be. He lost on points to Muhammad and afterwards admitted that fatigue was a huge factor. Though Askren has no plans to wrestle again, he wanted to clarify that his newly transplanted lungs were fine and his energy issues had more to do with an underprepared heart.
“The hardest thing to get back has been my cardio,” Askren said. “It’s funny because I actually misspoke because I was so tired. I said, ‘My lungs hurt,’ I meant to say my lungs don’t hurt, it’s my legs. My legs just fall off a cliff at some point. My best guess from my research on ChatGPT is that it’s from something called ‘heart deconditioning.’ If you don’t use your heart effectively, it gets weaker, right? It’s a muscle and I couldn’t use it, I couldn’t make myself work hard for somewhere between six and eight months. It’s getting better constantly, but it’s taking a while.”
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