Thomas Petersen stopped Gabriel Lorenco by TKO at 4:47 of Round 3 on the UFC Vegas 124 prelims Saturday. He did it after spending most of the first round getting beaten up, part of it illegally.
The heavyweight fight was Lorenco’s UFC debut. The Brazilian earned his contract on the Contender Series in 2025 and then waited more than a year to actually get in the octagon. He made the most of the opening five minutes. Petersen got the early takedown and took the back, but Lorenco scrambled free and hurt him with a knee that Cageside Press described as clearly illegal. The referee never saw it. Cageside also flagged a few elbows that drifted close to the back of the head.
Petersen got tagged again, swung his way out of trouble, then got dropped. He crawled back to his feet and was still eating shots heading into the final minute. Somehow he made the horn. Cageside counted upwards of 50 significant strikes for Lorenco in that round. The UFC’s own account posted “WHAT A FIRST ROUND 🤯” right after, which is about as restrained as that account gets.
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Lorenco drew a warning between rounds for the elbows to the back of the head, and the second round belonged to Petersen. He landed a pair of left hands, put Lorenco on his back and went hunting for a kimura while the Brazilian looked like he was running low on gas. Lorenco escaped, but the momentum had clearly flipped.
In the third, Petersen took it to the mat about a minute in and went to work from half-guard, staying chest to chest, digging punches to the body and sneaking in elbows. The legal kind. When Lorenco turned to his side, Petersen kept punching, and he kept going when Lorenco rolled back. Cageside noted that the tank Petersen had to drain surviving Round 1 probably cost him an earlier finish. He needed roughly another 20 seconds to gather enough to close it out.
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He had good reason to want the stoppage. Aaron Bronsteter wrote on X that without the finish the fight may have been a majority draw, adding that a 10-8 for Petersen in the third was definitely on the table. Given the unpenalized fouls in the first, a 10-8 the other way in that round wasn’t out of the question either. Bronsteter also had the over 1.5 rounds at -135 on his card for the Cortes-Acosta vs. Walker event. “Never in doubt 😅,” he wrote afterward.
Petersen came in 3-4 in the UFC, trading wins and losses lately. This one gets “The Train” back to 4-4. Lorenco leaves his debut with a loss and a referee warning, after doing more damage in five minutes than plenty of heavyweights manage in 15.
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My take: Lorenco gets dinged for the fouls, but the ref deserves the bigger share of the blame for missing that knee, and Petersen paid for it with a round of his life. Taking that much punishment and still having the gas to finish a guy with 13 seconds left on the clock is exactly why you book heavyweights on the prelims.
