Marat Grigorian won’t be fighting Luo Chao in Tokyo. Their semifinal in the ONE SAMURAI Featherweight Kickboxing Tournament at ONE SAMURAI 4 is off after Luo weighed in at 164.4 pounds, 9.4 pounds over the 155-pound limit. That’s a lot of pounds to miss by. The cancellation surfaced on r/MMA on Friday, October 16, the day before the card.
The event goes down Saturday, October 17, at Ariake Arena in Tokyo. The stakes were big because the tournament winner gets a guaranteed shot at ONE featherweight kickboxing world champion Superbon. The other semifinal on the card pits Japanese star Masaaki Noiri against Mohammad Siasarani. The available reports don’t say how ONE will handle Grigorian’s half of the bracket now, whether that means a replacement, a walkover into the final, or something else. I’m not going to guess.
Luo came in hot. The 25-year-old Chinese contender is 44-11 and riding a six-fight winning streak, including a split decision over Denis Souza Jr. and a points win over Kosuke Takagi at ONE SAMURAI 2. He told BJPenn.com he felt he’d left a lot of his game plan unused against Takagi in his first fight in Japan. The sanda-trained striker also has a two-inch height edge on Grigorian, and he’d been teasing a secret plan for this one.
“We prepared something very different to fight him. We would do something tricky based on my original style. But I don’t want to go into any details. We will see on fight night,” Luo said in that BJPenn.com preview.
He also said this, which reads rough in hindsight: “You definitely need to be mentally strong fighting Marat, and of course we are pushing my body to a limit this time because I’m fighting one of the strongest guys in the division.”
Luo had already mapped out his path. He predicted he’d beat Grigorian, then meet Noiri in the final, and said he’d go for “a knockout, or at least a knockdown.” Winning the whole thing could have put him on track to become the second Chinese athlete to hold ONE gold, after featherweight MMA champion Tang Kai.
Grigorian is the one getting robbed here. The three-time Glory kickboxing world champion has challenged for ONE gold twice and comes in on a four-fight winning streak. He made the trip, cut his weight, and now he’s left waiting on a promotion decision for a tournament he was supposed to fight his way through.
My take: I loved the setup. A 25-year-old with a sanda base telling a Glory legend he’s got a trick up his sleeve is exactly the kind of chatter that sells a semifinal. But you can’t call your shot and then miss the scale by almost 10 pounds in a tournament with a title shot at the end. Whatever “something tricky” was, nobody gets to see it Saturday. Grigorian deserves an answer from ONE before Noiri and Siasarani walk out at Ariake Arena on October 17.
