Michel Pereira returned to action on Saturday night at UFC Vegas 81, earning a win over Andre Petroski via TKO just one minute into their main card bout (watch the finish here).
It was a bit of an anti-climactic return for “Demolidor,” who was making his middleweight debut after missing weight for an important welterweight contender’s clash with Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson. That bout would get canceled, and hey … when you weigh in at 174 pounds, don’t be surprised when that happens.
Pereira still sounds sour about the whole experience, though. On the latest episode of The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani, Michel had strong words for “Wonderboy.”
“I wanted to fight, of course,” he said through a translator. “I was ready and prepared. I suffered a lot to lose weight for that fight, so obviously I was upset. I thought he was a little coward. In my entire career, I never saw anything like that, but at the same time, he was within his rights.”
“So what happened is it was a year and a half without a fight,” he explained. “I had five fights canceled because of other fighters and I started gaining a lot of weight. On the week of the fight, a lot of weird things started happening to me, and then we realized it was because I was too strong, I had gained a lot of weight, and that was the challenge.”
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never see Pereira vs. Thompson now.
“He’s in a different weightclass so I don’t think about fighting him any more,” he said. “I’m at 185 and the opportunity has passed.”
“185 is the weight class where I feel better, my body is better, my training is easier,” Pereira said about middleweight. “In the other weightclass I suffered so much. I feel good in this weightclass so that’s the weightclass I’ll stay in for now. I only had to cut ten pounds in the week before, I prepared more and just felt so much better. I just kept training.
As for his fight against Petroski which ended before it even got started, Pereira is just as surprised by the quick win as the rest of us.
“The gameplan was to knock him out, but I didn’t think it would be this fast,” he admitted. “He was a guy that was really good, coming from a victory, so it really surprised me.”
“I already spoke to my manager because I want to come back and fight, the sooner the better, I’m ready. No preference, I don’t even know much about this new weight class but one fight that I really like, I really enjoy him, he’s a bit of a showman, his name is Israel Adesanya.”
“It would be a fun fight, I have nothing against him, just admiration. And I’d love to fight him.”
It may be a while before “The Last Stylebender” returns to action, but we can’t think of a better fight for that comeback than Michel Pereira.
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
