Wang Cong lost the vacant UFC flyweight title to Natalia Silva by unanimous decision on October 3 at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City. Three days later she showed the public why she thinks it went that way. She posted a video on Instagram of what appears to be a scratch on her right eyeball, which she says came from a poke in the first round of the UFC 332 main event. Does that change anything on her record? No. The more interesting part is why, because the answer comes down to who actually holds the power on fight night.
Wang’s statement places the foul late in the opening round: “The game is lost. What a pity. I have some regrets then because of the first [round], the eye was poked in the second half.” Then she added the line any appeal would have to rest on: “The line of sight is blocked, and then I couldn’t see it when I was poked in the right eye in the first [round].”
I believe her. Flyweight is a division built on distance management and reading feints. Taking away depth perception in one eye for the rest of a championship fight is a serious handicap. Sympathy and a successful appeal live in different buildings, though, and the second one has very strict door policies.
The rulebook agrees with her, and it doesn’t matter
On paper, Wang has the rules on her side. The Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts list eye gouging and eye poking as fouls. The ABC MMA Officials Handbook bans “eye gouging of any kind” and treats a standing fighter coming forward with “fingers outstretched toward an opponent’s face/eyes” as committing a foul. That second clause is the one I wish referees enforced with more nerve, because the open hand pawing at someone’s face is how most of these pokes happen.
The catch is that the referee enforces those rules, and nobody else does. The Nevada regulations, as cited in Athlon Sports’ breakdown, say “the referee is the sole arbiter of a bout” and that the referee’s decisions on “declaring fouls or stopping a contest… may not be overturned, except as otherwise provided”. In practice, if the referee doesn’t take a point or disqualify someone on the night, the result almost always stands. Nothing in Wang’s statement mentions a deduction.
To get anywhere with a commission, a fighter generally has to show that the referee made a clear error that broke a specific regulation. Showing that the referee missed a foul doesn’t meet that bar. Commissions also tend to defer to what the official says they saw from three feet away, which is a hard thing to argue against with a phone video shot days later.
The precedents are brutal
Look at Bruno Silva. In June 2024 he appealed his technical decision loss to Chris Weidman after multiple eye pokes contributed to the fight being stopped. The pokes directly shaped how that bout ended, and the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board still denied him. The loss stayed on his record.
Then there’s Michel Pereira, who tried to appeal his UFC Baku loss to Shara “Bullet” Magomedov over hair pulling and an accidental eye poke, with no points deducted for either. Pereira at least brought arithmetic to the fight. His argument was that a single deduction would have turned the result into a draw. The appeal went nowhere, and he was later released from the UFC.
Wang’s case looks weaker than both of those. The poke didn’t end the fight, which was Silva’s situation. She also lost on all three cards. The sources don’t include the scorecards, so I can’t tell you whether one point would have moved anything. Still, climbing over a unanimous verdict in a title fight with a single foul, which is what her statement describes, is a lot to ask of a body that rarely second-guesses its referees in the first place.
She isn’t actually asking
Wang hasn’t said she plans to file a formal appeal. Her Instagram post spends more time on acceptance and a comeback than on grievance, and she closes with “Where to fall, get up, go back and summarize yourself. Come on, try again.” That reads like someone building a case for another shot at the belt, and I think it’s the smarter play. A scratched eye on video won’t move a commission. It might stick in the minds of the people who make matchups.
It also points at the real fix, which has nothing to do with appeals. The handbook already calls outstretched fingers a foul. If referees started warning fighters for the open hand before the poke lands, instead of after someone is blinking through the second half of a round, we’d have far fewer of these Instagram videos. Silva leaves Salt Lake City as the flyweight champion, and the record says unanimous decision. Wang’s best route back is a rematch, because the appeal process has never given anyone a win in a case like hers.
