Cris Cyborg has a pick for UFC 334, and she got there by thinking about the gym. According to MMA Sucka, the PFL women’s featherweight champion revealed her prediction for Saturday’s heavyweight title fight between Ciryl Gane and Josh Hokit and pointed to her own experience inside an MMA gym to explain it. The report available to us doesn’t say which way she went or quote her directly, so I won’t put words in her mouth.
Her opinion carries weight. Cyborg is a former UFC, Strikeforce, Invicta and Bellator featherweight champion, holds the record for most wins by a woman in MMA, and came up at Chute Boxe in Curitiba, a camp famous for what went on in its sparring. If anybody gets to judge a fight by what happens behind closed gym doors, it’s her.
The Hokit question
The fight itself is a strange one on paper. Hokit is 10-0, sits No. 10 at heavyweight in our rankings (Meta’s UFC rankings had him at No. 5 as of Oct. 24), trains at Jackson-Wink MMA and last fought June 14. Three years ago he hadn’t had a pro fight. He debuted at Bellator 300 on Oct. 7, 2023, submitting Spencer Smith with an arm-triangle in Round 3, then armbarred Sean Rose in Round 2 in September 2024 before three wins in LFA and a trip through Dana White’s Contender Series. Before all that he was a two-time All-American wrestler at Fresno State and a practice-squad guy with the San Francisco 49ers.
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That wrestling base is the whole case for Hokit against a striker like Gane. Whether Cyborg’s gym reads tell her the wrestler gets there is the part of her pick worth hearing.
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Hokit, for his part, has spent fight week doing a bit. He told Ariel Helwani how he’d answer any fouls from Gane, an escalation that started with “If he pokes my eye, I’m gonna hit him in the back of the head” and ended with “If he finds my family and kills them, I’m going to France and conquering them.” He also opened media day with a roast of Gane, Daniel Cormier, Kayla Harrison and Joaquin Buckley, and the two heavyweights traded words at their first faceoff in Times Square on Tuesday.
Hokit turns 29 on Thursday. Two days later, on Nov. 14, he finds out whether 10 pro fights is enough experience to take a UFC title from Gane.
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