Caio Borralho’s UFC 326 win put him back in the title picture and sent Reinier de Ridder spiraling out of it.
It was a big win for Borralho, who is now 8-1 in the UFC and well in range of a middleweight championship opportunity. The same can’t be said for de Ridder, who suffers his second straight loss and performed in a manner that had UFC CEO Dana White questioning his motivation.
“I don’t know, in my opinion he didn’t look like he really wanted to be in there tonight,” White said of de Ridder at the UFC 326 post-fight press conference. “That didn’t look like the same guy to me tonight.”
Borralho spoke to the media afterwards as well and he was asked about White’s take on de Ridder’s mental state.
“He felt my energy, you know?” Borralho said. “Actually, he felt my energy during the entire week, I think he didn’t want to be doing all the media stuff and all this stuff the whole week. When I give him some words into the press conference, he didn’t respond, I think he didn’t want to be there way before the fight, and when I got inside that octagon, they can feel my energy. I was happy, I was present, and he felt it.
“But the guy did very good. He took it like a man, and I respect him for that. That’s the fight game, if Dana said that, it’s OK. I’m going to make more guys feel like that.”
It was a complete three-round performance for Borralho, who used all of his skills to outwork de Ridder. On the feet, Borralho looked to be consistently landing the harder punches to make up for a narrow differential in the strike count; on the ground, Borralho didn’t shy away from initiating the grappling against the Dutch submission expert.
Borralho has plenty of respect for de Ridder, but admitted the vibe was strange between them during fight week.
“I just think he wanted to prove a point to himself and that’s what made him a little bit angry with me,” Borralho said. “Because I didn’t say shit about him. I was just building up the fight, but I didn’t say any crap. I said good things, I think I did a good line in the press conference, but it was facts. The three fights that he lost, he gave up, so we wanted to see who was going to come in there into the octagon.
“Tonight, he wasn’t ‘de Quitter,’ he was de Ridder, and that’s the kind of guy that I wanted to face, because I wanted to test myself against the best de Ridder ever and I respect him for that, but I showed how good my striking is and I showed how good my grappling is. Everybody knows now.”
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