Waldo Cortes-Acosta never thought he would be fighting Andrei Arlovski. Yet, here he is just days away from facing the living legend.
It’s a surreal matchup for Cortes-Acosta (10-1 MMA, 3-1 UFC), who has been watching Arlovski (34-22 MMA, 23-16 UFC) fight since he was a teenager. Cortes-Acosta, now 32, feels proud of how far he’s come in MMA now that he’s fighting a former UFC champion at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 234 in Las Vegas.
“When I started MMA, I never thought I would be fighting him,” Cortes-Acosta told MMA Junkie in Spanish. “I thought maybe I would fight other fighters like maybe if I got really, really good, and I would get to fight Jon Jones. But fighting Andrei Arlovski, I never thought about it. I began fighting around 2014, 2015, and I thought in a few years he would be retired, but no. He’s kept going, and now we’re in 2024, and he’s still at it.”
