Laura Sanko: Alexander Volkanovski ‘still the greatest featherweight of all-time’ despite UFC 298 title loss
Alexander Volkanovski may no longer be the UFC featherweight champion, but UFC color commentator Laura Sanko wants to relay an important message to the newer MMA fan base: Outside of a couple rare cases, everybody loses in this game.
Volkanovski was knocked out by new champion Ilia Topuria in the second round of the main event of UFC 298 this past Saturday in Anaheim. Volkanovski’s reign — which began in December 2019 after defeating Max Holloway at UFC 245 — comes to an end after five successful title defenses over a more than four-year span. Volkanovski has now lost back-to-back stoppages at the hands of Topuria and lightweight champ Islam Makhachev.
Despite the loss, Sanko still holds Volkanovski with the highest regard.
“He’s still the greatest featherweight of all-time at this point,” Sanko told MMA Fighting. “I’ve felt that way for a long time. I guess the greats get beat, right? The greats get beat, and this is my problem with the MMA hummingbird memory— one loss does not erase greatness.
“You’re talking Jose Aldo, you’re talking Max Holloway, and you’re talking Alexander Volkanovski [in featherweight GOAT conversations], and I’m a big believer that Alex was the greatest of those three. It’s a great argument to have though, because certainly there’s a strong argument for any of those three guys. Jose Aldo probably would be second in my book, but this doesn’t erase that just because he lost. It may be the last time that we see him at the top of the mountain at featherweight again, but it doesn’t change what he did.”
Volkanovski’s title reign consisted of an underrated classic rematch with Holloway at UFC 251 in July 2020, where “The Great” won a split decision in one of the closest title fights you’ll ever see. He then went on to defeat Brian Ortega in MMA Fighting’s No. 3 ranked 2021 Fight of the Year, and put on near flawless performances against “The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung, Holloway in a trilogy fight, and Yair Rodriguez this past July at UFC 290.
If UFC 298 marked the final time Volkanovski holds featherweight gold, Sanko believes there’s a simple way to describe Volkanovski’s championship run to someone who isn’t fully tapped into the MMA bubble.
“He was greatness,” Sanko said. “He was the greatest of that generation — and possibly of all-time in my mind — because here’s a guy who wasn’t built for this division height-wise, right? He was always the shorter guy, and he had to develop skills as he went, which to me is always very impressive when people do that at the highest level.
“If you remember early on [in his UFC run], he was pushing guys up against the fence and grappling, and that wasn’t necessarily going to win him a ton of a ton of fans. But over time, what was always so impressive to me about him is that even when I thought he had reached the, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the greatest featherweight of all-time,’ then he’d go out there and he’d have another fight, and I’m like, how did he find another level to his game?
“That third Max Holloway fight was bananas in terms of what he went out there and did. That fight, to me, is part of the reason why he’s the GOAT, because to do that to arguably one of the other GOATs is insane. It was an absolutely incredible performance.
“So to see a guy like an Alexander Volkanovski work and evolve even at the top of the mountain, and when you look at the best champions of all-time, that’s what they struggle with — that I’ve gotten here, how do I stay here? How do I stay motivated? How do I stay hungry? How do I continue to improve? And somehow he found a way to find just enough of a chip in every situation where he was doing that. And to me, that will be part of his legacy, is just his ability to outdo himself every single time that he went in there.”