Fast facts
- Division: Bantamweight (last UFC division); current RAF Lightweight Crossover Champion
- Record: 16-6 (MMA)
- Nationality: United States
- Team/gym: Fight Ready
- Notable wins: Demetrious Johnson, T.J. Dillashaw, Marlon Moraes, Sergio Pettis, Wilson Reis; 2008 Olympic gold in freestyle wrestling
Henry Cejudo didn’t sleep alone in a bed of his own until USA Wrestling gave him one. He was a teenager by then, living as a resident athlete at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, a long way from the Maryvale section of Phoenix where his mother worked several jobs and still couldn’t pull the family out of poverty. Every belt and every medal that came later started from a borrowed mattress.
He was born in Los Angeles on February 9, 1987, the second youngest of seven children of Mexican immigrants. His father drank and used drugs and was violent, and the family kept moving around LA to stay ahead of it. When Henry was four, his father was jailed after threatening to kill the whole family. His mother took the kids to New Mexico before he got out. The father was deported two years later and died when Henry was about 20. After a couple of years in New Mexico the family landed in Phoenix.
The wrestler
The blueprint was his older brother, Angel Cejudo, who went 150-0 and won four Arizona state titles. Henry won four state titles too, two in Arizona and two in Colorado after the move to the training center, and in 2006 ASICS named him National High School Wrestler of the Year. That April, still in high school, he won the US national title at 55 kilograms, the first high schooler to qualify for the World Team Trials since USA Wrestling took over the sport in 1983. He skipped college wrestling entirely and went straight to the international circuit.
The 2008 Olympic run is the part of his story I’d hand to any young wrestler who thinks a bad start decides a match. At the Beijing Games he lost the first period in three of his four matches. He dropped the opening period to Radoslav Velikov, a reigning world champion, then took the next two. Same against Georgia’s Besarion Gochashvili. Same against Azerbaijan’s Namig Sevdimov. In the final he beat Japan’s Tomohiro Matsunaga in straight periods and became, at 21, the youngest American ever to win Olympic wrestling gold (Kyle Snyder broke that record in 2016). His coach for those Games was Kevin Jackson, an Olympic champion who had also won a UFC title, and that detail gets left out of most retellings.
He came back for a second Olympic cycle and fell short at the 2012 Trials, losing to top seed Nick Simmons. Then he took off his shoes and left them in the middle of the mat.
The fighter
He announced the MMA move on Twitter in January 2013. He’d wrestled at 121 pounds but debuted at 135, stopping Michael Poe with punches for the Arizona-based World Fighting Federation. He went 6-0 in about a year, and in the background he had already put real work into his hands: he won the Copper Gloves amateur boxing tournament in Phoenix in 2010. Somehow he also finished a theology degree at Grand Canyon University in 2015.
The UFC signed him in July 2014, and the early stretch was messy. Medical issues on weigh-in day scrapped his debut against Scott Jorgensen at UFC 177, and because he had a history of missing weight, Dana White said Cejudo would move up to bantamweight or leave the company. He won his debut at 135 over Dustin Kimura, then came back down to flyweight and won decisions over Chris Cariaso, Chico Camus and Jussier Formiga. A young Brandon Moreno helped him prepare for Formiga.
His first shot at Demetrious Johnson, at UFC 197 in April 2016, ended in a first-round TKO loss. He lost again that December to Joseph Benavidez by split decision after the two had coached against each other on The Ultimate Fighter 24. Plenty of hyped Olympians would have drifted out of the sport after that. Cejudo stopped Wilson Reis in the second round at UFC 215, outpointed Sergio Pettis at UFC 218, and earned his rematch.
Two belts
At UFC 227 on August 4, 2018, Cejudo beat Johnson by split decision and became the first Olympic gold medalist to win a UFC division title. It was as close as the scorecards: 13 of 25 media outlets had it for Cejudo, 12 for Johnson. Then the champion at 135, T.J. Dillashaw, came down to take his belt and lasted 32 seconds in January 2019. USADA later announced Dillashaw had tested positive for EPO.
At UFC 238 that June, Cejudo stopped Marlon Moraes in the third round for the vacant bantamweight title, becoming the fourth fighter to hold UFC belts in two divisions at once. He did it on an ankle he’d rolled just days before, which needed therapy before he could even fight. He gave up the flyweight belt that December to stay at bantamweight, and he was later booked against Dominick Cruz on May 9, 2020, after José Aldo withdrew over visa issues.
The ending, and the encore
The UFC chapter closed on December 6, 2025, at UFC 323, when Payton Talbott retired him. MMA Fighting’s Damon Martin later wrote that Talbott thoroughly dominated Cejudo and that Cejudo was already on his way out when they met. The rankings now list him at No. 40 at bantamweight.
Wrestling took him back. He signed with Real American Freestyle and beat Urijah Faber at RAF 06 on February 28, 2026. An injury scrapped his April date with reigning UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili, and when they finally met at RAF Georgia on July 11, Dvalishvili won the decision in a bout that took Match of the Night. Six weeks later, at RAF 12 on August 22, the inaugural Lightweight Crossover belt was on the line. Cejudo pinned him in 36 seconds.
He still talks fights for a living. On his Pound 4 Pound podcast this week, he called for athletic commissions to pull Herb Dean after Dean’s stoppage of Esteban Ribovics vs. King Green at UFC 332. “It’s ridiculous. No accountability whatsoever,” Cejudo said. He’s also campaigning for the man who beat him. After Talbott knocked out Deiveson Figueiredo in 129 seconds on that card, Cejudo wrote on X, “Nobody wants to fight Payton Talbott,” adding, “He’s been ignored for a year.” He wants Sean O’Malley next for Talbott, and O’Malley’s response included a backhanded nod to Cejudo that I suspect Henry enjoyed anyway: “Henry Cejudo, did a pretty good job when he used to fight.”
That’s generous to the point of comedy for a man with an Olympic gold and two UFC belts. And the next person to test the RAF champion’s work will be Petr Yan, who meets Dvalishvili, the wrestler Cejudo just pinned, for the UFC bantamweight title at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi on October 24.
