Fast facts
- Division: Featherweight, current and two-time UFC champion
- Record: 13-1 before signing with the UFC, then 15 wins and three losses inside the Octagon
- Nationality: Australian, born in Wollongong, New South Wales, to a Macedonian father and a Greek mother
- Team/gym: Freestyle Fighting Gym in Wollongong, with camps at City Kickboxing in Auckland and at Tiger Muay Thai and Bangtao Muay Thai & MMA in Phuket
- Notable wins: Max Holloway (three times), José Aldo, Brian Ortega, Chad Mendes, Yair Rodríguez, Chan Sung Jung, Diego Lopes (twice)
Long before anyone in Wollongong paid to watch Alexander Volkanovski fight, he was the one paying. As a kid he rented UFC tapes from Blockbuster, and by 14 he was buying pay-per-views himself. That same year he walked away from Greco-Roman wrestling, a sport in which he’d already won two national titles by age 12, and went to play rugby league as a front rower. It’s a strange detail to sit with now. The boy who couldn’t stop watching fights gave up the one combat sport he was winning at, and it took him almost a decade to come back.
The front rower from Warilla
Volkanovski went to Lake Illawarra High School and poured concrete for a living after he graduated. On weekends he was a semi-professional for the Warilla Gorillas in the Group 7 Rugby League, and a good one. He won the Mick Cronin Medal in 2010 as the league’s best player, then helped Warilla win the 2011 premiership and took Man of the Match in the grand final against Gerringong.
Then, at 23, in the back half of 2011, he quit.
His coach Joe Lopez has said Volkanovski first wandered into MMA and Greco-Roman at 22 simply to stay fit during the rugby off-season. He weighed 97 kg (214 pounds) at the time. The passion arrived fast, and so did the reasoning. Volkanovski once explained that in a team sport you can play well and still lose, while in fighting the result belongs to you alone. “In fighting, it’s all on me,” he said. “Each fight is like a grand final in the rugby league.”
What followed was one of the longer weight cuts in the sport, stretched across years. He went 4-0 as an amateur at middleweight, turned pro and worked his way down through welterweight and lightweight before settling at featherweight. Along the way he took a single professional boxing bout in 2015, a four-round unanimous decision over Dillon Bargero at super welterweight. On the regional circuit across Oceania and Asia he collected a Pacific Xtreme Combat title and two Australian Fighting Championship featherweight belts, and arrived at the UFC at 13-1 riding 10 straight wins.
How he fights
Lopez’s early read still holds up. Volkanovski developed into a counter striker with a heavy overhand right and an offensive wrestler, the kid who won national titles at 12 resurfacing in a grown man’s body. The numbers he’s piled up at 145 tell you the rest. He has the second-highest striking differential in UFC featherweight history at 2.86, the fourth-lowest bottom position percentage at 1.08%, and the longest average fight time in division history at 18:03. He is very hard to put on his back, and he’s happy to stay in there with you for a long time.
Then there are the legs. Volkanovski holds the division records for leg kicks landed in a fight (75, against Max Holloway the first time) and total leg strikes in a fight (81, against José Aldo). If you want a single image of his style, picture a short, thick featherweight chopping away at a lead calf for 25 minutes until the other guy can’t plant.
The climb
His UFC debut came on Nov. 26, 2016, a second-round TKO of Yusuke Kasuya at lightweight, after which he announced he was dropping to featherweight. The early run had a comic stretch in Sydney in 2017, when Jeremy Kennedy, Humberto Bandenay and Drex Zamboanga all fell off the card in turn and Volkanovski ended up beating newcomer Shane Young at a 150-pound catchweight. He got Kennedy anyway at UFC 221 and stopped him, then outpointed Darren Elkins.
The fight that told everyone what he was came at UFC 232 against Chad Mendes. Volkanovski got dropped twice, kept going and stopped Mendes in the second round for Fight of the Night. Five months later he beat Aldo by unanimous decision at UFC 237.
Champion, twice
He took the belt from Holloway at UFC 245 on Dec. 14, 2019, by unanimous decision. The rematch at UFC 251 was messier. Volkanovski won a split decision, but 18 of 27 media scores went to Holloway, and Dana White and John McCarthy were among those who disagreed with the judges. The Ortega fight at UFC 266 settled any lingering doubts, because Volkanovski climbed out of several deep submission attempts and still won the decision. He stopped Chan Sung Jung in the fourth round at UFC 273, then finished the Holloway trilogy at UFC 276 with three 50-45 cards, which is about as clean a closing argument as you get.
After that he went looking for something bigger. Volkanovski moved up to face Islam Makhachev for the lightweight title at UFC 284 in February 2023 and lost a close unanimous decision that earned Fight of the Night. He came back down and unified the belts with a third-round TKO of interim champ Yair Rodríguez at UFC 290. When Charles Oliveira pulled out of UFC 294, Volkanovski took the Makhachev rematch on 11 days’ notice and was knocked out by a head kick in the first round. Four months later, at UFC 298, Ilia Topuria knocked him out in the second and took his title.
Two knockout losses in a row at 35, with one of them a short-notice gamble at a heavier weight, usually means the end of the story. Instead, when Topuria vacated, Volkanovski beat Diego Lopes for the vacant belt at UFC 314 in April 2025, becoming the oldest featherweight champion in UFC history at 36 years and 195 days. He beat Lopes again at UFC 325 on Feb. 1, 2026, for a $100,000 Fight of the Night bonus and became the oldest to defend the title, at 37 years and 125 days. That’s eight featherweight title wins, tied with Aldo for the most ever, and he was also the first Australian-born fighter to win any UFC championship.
Where he stands
As of mid-June, Wikipedia listed him No. 2 in the UFC’s pound-for-pound rankings, a spot he held at No. 1 across two stretches in 2022 and 2023. The man he beat twice is now trying his luck elsewhere. Yahoo Sports reported that Lopes, whose only two defeats in his recent run both came against Volkanovski, will debut at lightweight against Oliveira for the BMF title at UFC 335 on Dec. 12 in Las Vegas.
Away from the cage, he married his wife Emma in 2012 and they have four daughters. He has a YouTube channel where he started a cooking show in 2021. His nickname, The Great, is a nod to Alexander the Great, who, as Volkanovski has pointed out, also had a Macedonian father and a Greek mother.
Next is Movsar Evloev, who is undefeated and who shares a spot with Volkanovski on the list of most decision wins in featherweight history. They meet at UFC 333 on Oct. 24, 2026, less than a month after Volkanovski turned 38.
