A generally somewhat hard to please Dana White did his best Oprah Winfrey impression on the most recent season of Contender Series. The UFC boss handed out a record-high 37 total contracts throughout the season’s 10 weeks. As a result of those 37 being brought in, four were members of the strawweight division. Out of the select four, only one scored a highlight-reel finish and that belonged to Brazil’s Luana Pinheiro.
“It’s the feeling of a job well done,” Pinheiro told MyMMANews about making it to the UFC. “Ever since I migrated to MMA that was my goal. I’m really happy that I was able to achieve it and begin my journey now. I thought that the Helen Harper fight would definitely bring me some visibility. But I didn’t think it would be that quick, actually. I thought that I would need to have some more fights, some more victories before having this shot [in the UFC].”
In week 9 of Dana White’s Contender Series season 4, Pinheiro walked through Stephanie Frausto with a powerful left hook that preceded a plethora of follow-up shots on the ground. The Judo black belt extender her current winning streak to six, the first four coming by submission with the recent two by TKO. The Nova Uniao representative now gets prepared to head into the UFC with a near-pristine 8-1 record to display.
Pinheiro’s win over The Ultimate Fighter season 23 veteran, Helen Harper, came in November 2019 and she started training for whatever was on the horizon at 2020’s start. Having to go through the Contender Series to get to the UFC was something that was already in mind, therefore the target was a date in the summer like August.
Essentially in a camp for four months awaiting that timeframe, things got pushed back this November for the 27-year old. But in the end, things couldn’t have worked out any better.
Continued: UFC bound Luana Pinheiro aims to bring more gold back to Brazil
