UFC 248: Who is Joanna Jedrzejczyk, and can she beat China’s world champion Zhang Weili to reclaim her title?
Polish strawweight title contender Joanna Jedrzejczyk won 14 straight bouts before she found out her fiancé was cheating on her, and has since lost three of her five most recent fights
Joanna Jedrzejczyk will enter the Las Vegas octagon on Saturday night (Sunday morning, Hong Kong time) for her UFC strawweight title fight against China’s world champion Zhang Weili at UFC 248. The 32-year-old Polish fighter was the champion until November 2017 when American Rose Namajunas took the strawweight belt off her at UFC 217 in New York.
The belt didn’t stay in those hands for long. Brazil’s Jessica Andrade defeated Namajunas to claim supremacy in the 115lb weight division, then subsequently surrendered the title to Zhang after a first-round technical knockout in August 2019.
Does Jedrzejczyk have what it takes to reclaim the title? And how are you meant to pronounce her name? Here are five things you need to know about the UFC fighter before fight night.
1. It’s pronounced YED-ZHEY-CHIK (kind of)
The mixed martial artist’s surname is difficult to pronounce correctly, so many people call her “JJ”.
Jedrzejczyk has two other popular nicknames: “Joanna Violence” and “Joanna Champion”.
