UFC 290 unexpectedly turned out to be a first for Yazmin Jauregui.
To many observers’ surprise, the then-undefeated Jauregui tasted defeat for the very first time. Jauregui (10-1 MMA, 2-1 UFC), a highly touted prospect in the strawweight division, was stopped by Denis Gomes just 20 second into their bout last month in Las Vegas.
It was a tough pill to swallow for Jauregui, who hoped to enter the rankings with a win.
“The truth is that it was really sad how things went down for me,” Jauregui told MMA Junkie in Spanish. “At that moment, I was disappointed with how things went down, with how I lost. I would’ve liked to put up a fight.
“The truth is that I prepared well in camp. I can tell you that it was one of the hardest and longest camps that I did for a fight. So when the result happened, I couldn’t believe it. I was disappointed and upset. I wanted to fight. But thank God it wasn’t a bad KO, it was a TKO, and my health is good, and I’m well.
“It took me a few days to process everything. It wasn’t really the loss, but how I lost. That was the main thing. I’m not scared to lose. That’s how this sport is – cruel. It can give you beautiful things, and you can win and get recognition. However, at the same time, you can lose and experience the exact opposite. It was tough to process, but I’m now 100 percent.”
Jauregui said it took her about three to four days to process the defeat before she turned the page mentally. It was a tough thing to experience but not tough enough to deter her from her goal of becoming UFC champion.
“I didn’t want to speak with anyone or be too much on social media or anything like that, because the moment was for me,” Jauregui said. “I needed to meditate on the situation, figure out what I needed to do and hit the reset button, because there’s no way I was going to stay like that forever. I was born to do this. This is part of it. After the third day, I went, ‘It’s done. I know I lost, but what’s next?'”
Jauregui knows the error she committed from a technical standpoint, falling for Gomes’ faint to the body and eating a monster right hook to the chin. In addition to that, Jauregui believes she didn’t enter the fight with the right mentality.
“I went over the fight that same night after the event and the day after the event, and I’ve seen it a few times after that, too,” Jauregui said when asked about her performance. “I think I know what happened. I didn’t activate my fight mode, my fight instinct mode. That mode that when you step in the octagon, and you know it’s all or nothing.
“I was a bit overconfident, because I had done my job well in preparation and I felt so good in the locker room. The cardio, the strength, the technique, everything looked good. Maybe I stepped in the octagon too relaxed, a bit overconfident like, ‘Hey, I did the work well. Now I just need to have fun.’ And yeah, you do need to have fun, but at the end of the day you’re fighting, and the person in front of you doesn’t want you doing well. They want you to lose, they want to beat you, and I think that’s what happened. I entered too relaxed.”
Jauregui recently underwent surgery to repair an umbilical hernia that stemmed from her training camp for UFC 290. She’s recovering and eyes a December or January return.
The 24-year-old believes this defeat is part of the process and journey to becoming an elite fighter, and she plans to come back even stronger.
“I don’t want to lose,” Jauregui said. “I like competing and giving it my all at all times, but many people have developed very high expectations of me and my career, saying I’m the next champion and that I need to fight for the belt now and all these type of comments.
“However, people don’t know that this is a process and I can’t rush or skip the process. My moment will come and God’s timing is perfect, so I just need to keep working hard and keep moving forward. In a way, the loss did take some weight off my shoulders so people stop saying that I need to fight for the belt now, because that’s just not how things work.”
