The Sun put the phrase “Very unjust” over its piece questioning Ciryl Gane’s bump to heavyweight champion. The sentiment has stuck to UFC 334 like tape residue on a glove. I understand the reflex. Gane is wearing a belt he never won in a title fight. The man who gave it up, Tom Aspinall, is sidelined with eye injuries he suffered against Gane at UFC 321 in October 2025. On paper it reads like a guy getting promoted off the worst night of his opponent’s career.
I think the anger is pointed at the one defensible decision in this entire heavyweight mess.
Paper belts are the heavyweight tradition now
Trace how the last few heavyweight champions got there. Jon Jones won a vacant title at UFC 285 in March 2023 by submitting Gane with a first-round guillotine. He defended once, stopping Stipe Miocic with third-round ground-and-pound at UFC 309 after a spinning back kick. Then he walked away after turning 38 in July 2025 without ever unifying against Aspinall, and Aspinall was promoted to undisputed champion off that retirement.
So Aspinall’s own reign started with a paperwork upgrade. If Gane’s promotion is unjust, Aspinall’s was too. I don’t remember anyone calling the British champion a fraud for accepting a belt Jones refused to defend against him.
Gane also has a real case inside the current division. He beat Alex Pereira, a fighter who won the middleweight belt, held light heavyweight gold twice and was the UFC’s 2024 Fighter of the Year. Athlon Sports described that result as a setback in Pereira’s bid for a third division title, which is a polite way of saying Gane ended the experiment’s first chapter. Gane was also the last man in the cage with the champion. When a belt goes vacant, handing it to the guy who just fought for it and also beat the division’s most famous newcomer is about as clean as an administrative decision gets.
Aspinall vacating was his call, and Miocic, of all people, backed it in an interview with Athlon Sports. “I understand it’s probably hard for him to vacate his title the way he did,” Miocic said. He told the outlet he tore his retina after an accidental poke in his UFC 241 rematch with Daniel Cormier, and said he would have done the same thing as Aspinall if facing a layoff longer than a year.
The opponent is the problem
The part of this that should bother people is Josh Hokit standing across from Gane at Madison Square Garden.
Hokit is a former Fresno State wrestler who spent time on the San Francisco 49ers practice squad as a fullback. He signed with the UFC in August 2025 and has gone 4-0 in just over a year. Four fights is four fights. He’s also pretended to vomit at weigh-ins and insulted former First Lady Michelle Obama during the White House card, and nobody needs me to explain how that kind of noise moves a man up a matchmaking list. Miocic was diplomatic about it: “I know people love that stuff, but sometimes if you go overboard, then the well can run dry.”
Now look at Alexander Volkov. He has fought 20 times in the UFC, beat Rizvan Kuniev by unanimous decision at UFC 333 for his third straight win, and has one loss across his past eight appearances. He got so desperate for an answer that he snuck into the UFC 333 press conference as a crowd member to ask Dana White what he needed to do for a title shot. White appeared not to recognize him. Volkov told Ariel Helwani’s show this week that he still has no answer.
His read on the Hokit booking was blunt. “He fights maybe a grand total of a fight and a half in the organization, and they give him a title shot,” Volkov said. His math undersells Hokit’s 4-0 run, but the complaint lands. The fair counter on Volkov is his finishing rate. He hasn’t stopped anyone since his second-round Ezekiel choke of Tai Tuivasa in September 2023, and the UFC clearly cares about that. As someone who still grins every time a heavyweight hits a clean Ezekiel, I’ll take three straight wins from a 20-fight veteran over four wins and a vomit bit.
Volkov had another line that gets at the whole argument: “Fighter who has the belt, he defines what the belt means.” Gane can make this belt look legitimate by beating a wrestler on a short UFC résumé. He can’t make Hokit’s title shot look earned. Only the matchmakers could have done that, and they didn’t.
The fix is simple. Volkov said he fully supports Aspinall getting a title shot in his first fight back. The UFC should say that out loud, so the belt Gane carries into the Garden has an obvious next challenger the moment Aspinall is cleared. Volkov, meanwhile, has already pointed at the Pereira vs. Sergei Pavlovich winner from UFC 335 on Dec. 12 in Las Vegas. Give him that fight, and the heavyweight line finally makes sense again.
