Tony Laramie is the new RIZIN flyweight champion. The Canadian took the 125-pound title from Makoto “Shinryu” Takahashi by split decision in the RIZIN 55 main event Sunday at LaLa arena TOKYO-BAY in Funabashi, Chiba. Sherdog posted the scorecards on X: 29-28 and 29-28 for Laramie, 28-29 for Takahashi, after the full three rounds.
Laramie improves to 14-3 overall and 5-1 in RIZIN. Takahashi drops to 23-6-1 with one no contest, and 9-5 under the RIZIN banner. According to Cageside Press, Takahashi had only held the belt since June, so this was his first defense. He came in a year younger than the 27-year-old Laramie but with more than double his professional experience.
The win extends Laramie’s streak to four. Before Sunday he’d beaten Wataru Yamauchi, Takaki Soya and Yuki Motoya, the Motoya win coming at RIZIN Landmark this summer. His lone RIZIN loss was to Yuki Ito at RIZIN 50 in 2025. In a Yahoo Sports profile published two days before the fight, Laramie pointed to that defeat as the moment his life turned around. That piece covered a lot of rough road. He described his younger self as someone who was “being a scumbag” and said he now considers himself pretty much straight edge, mostly staying home and training. He’s the younger brother of former UFC fighter TJ Laramie, and he’d already won regional titles in Ontario’s PFC and BTC before RIZIN signed him in 2024.
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He also isn’t leaving Japan anytime soon. Yahoo reported that Laramie signed a new RIZIN contract the week before the fight, which keeps him with the promotion for the next couple of years. After that he wants a run in the UFC, and he named Joshua Van and Alexandre Pantoja as the flyweights he has his eye on. No opponent for a first defense has been announced.
The result also produced a statistical oddity, at least according to one fan. A user on r/MMA pointed out that with Takahashi’s loss, no RIZIN division currently has a Japanese champion, and guessed it’s the first time that’s happened in the promotion’s 11-year history. That’s a Reddit observation rather than anything RIZIN has confirmed, but it’s the kind of thing promoters notice. Shinya Aoki also weighed in on X, posting about Laramie’s coronation and Shinryu losing the belt.
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My take: the scorecards tell you how close this was. With two 29-28s against one 28-29, the judges split on at least one round, and a single swing frame decided who left Chiba with gold. I’ll take that over a title fight decided by some phantom 10-8 any day, because a split decision at 125 between two guys who push pace is the flyweight division doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Laramie told Yahoo he’s “willing to die in there no matter what,” and he fought like a man who meant it. Takahashi is 26, he lost a split, and he only wore the belt for five months. Book the rematch first, before Laramie starts circling Van and Pantoja.
