UFC 321: For Virna Jandiroba, playing 6 degrees of Demian Maia has paid off

In 2016, after she tapped out Lisa Ellis at Fight2Night 1 in Rio de Janeiro for her seventh submission victory, Virna Jandiroba proclaimed herself the female Demian Maia. Aside from a smattering of diehards within Brazil, nobody really noticed at the time because Maia was rolling hot dice in the UFC, having won six straight fights. After all, it’s long been a pastime in combat sports for young fighters to liken themselves to winners.

Yet nine years later, Maia is happily retired and Jandiroba is the one at the top. She fights Mackenzie Dern at UFC 321 on Saturday for the strawweight title that Weili Zhang vacated. Very quietly she has insinuated herself into the title picture, not unlike Maia at UFC 112 in 2010, when he fought fellow Brazilian Anderson Silva for the middleweight title.

UFC 112 was the first time the Octagon had visited Abu Dhabi, the same place that Jandiroba will face off with Dern. At 37 years old, Jandiroba has 14 submission victories to her name.

When Maia hung up the gloves, he had 14 submissions to his name.

Through 11 fights in the UFC, Jandiroba has stealthily compiled an undeniable record of 8-3, highlighted by a five-fight win streak. In Maia’s first 11 UFC fights, he put together an exquisitely non-splashy record of 8-3, which included a five-fight win streak.

Cue the eerie music because Virna Jandiroba, who showed up on the scene like Esmerelda with her crystal ball back in the day, is dressing up like Demian Maia for Halloween.

“Yeah, I think it might have been a little pretentious of me to call myself [the female Demian Maia], but still, I think the way that we view and utilize jiu-jitsu is similar,” Jandiroba says. “I think we’re very goal oriented, so the use of jiu-jitsu considering the goals in MMA, I think in that side of things we match quite a bit.

“What I try to do and what I try to accomplish are similar things that he was doing when he was competing.”

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When Maia was competing in MMA, he was the closest thing to a pacifist the cage has ever admitted. If he could finish a fight without drawing blood from his opponent, he would do that. To wrest an arm from the socket or cut off the carotid so that somebody might drift off to sleep were the preferred methods of victory. For nearly two decades he added the symphonic swells to an ongoing death metal concert.

Jandiroba isn’t exactly the same in this philosophy, as she’ll gladly extract blood from an opponent, which she did in the first fight with Dern back in 2020 by turning her nose into a bloody pulp. In fact, there’s a methodically untame component to the way Jandiroba fights which has served her well through her hot streak leading to Saturday. She did some nasty work in beating the likes of Amanda Lemos and Loopy Godínez.

Still, there are parallels that made Jandiroba’s “female Maia” shout a little more nuanced than Tatiana Suarez’s designation as the “Female Khabib.” They are based more on evolution than revolution, which is a formula for longevity.

“There is a physical thing with age, where maybe things don’t work the same as they did before, but in my case, the knowledge that I gathered through the years makes me a much better fighter — and much better athlete — because I have a better understanding of myself,” says Jandiroba, sounding exactly like the month-shy-of-42-year-old Maia did just before he scored his last UFC victory over Ben Askren in Singapore.

“I have a better understanding of my mechanics, of my mindset and everything,” she says. “And I believe that all the knowledge that I gathered through the years ended up making aging something that benefits me.”

Maia, it might be remembered, adapted his jiu-jitsu well into the twilight of his career. His offensive wrestling got better with time, as did his striking. He’d more than hold his own anywhere a fight took place, but he remained a Venus flytrap on the ground. To go there with him was to play with fire. He tapped into the in-fight psyches of Carlos Condit and Neil Magny and Matt Brown, and they in turn tapped the hell out.

In other words, a cerebral fighter who never stopped learning. Which is what Maia sees in Jandiroba, a fighter with a college degree who got into martial arts to deal with anxiety as a teenager.

“She’s a smart fighter, and I think she’s tough,” Maia says. “And I always thought of myself as a tough guy. I was the guy that, if you were beating me, I was never going to give up. And I think that she has the same energy, that attitude of you should kill me to win this fight.”

As with all the interwoven connections that lead people to each other, Maia didn’t know Jandiroba until fairly recently. As in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu scene there are six degrees of separation from the many degrees of black belts, and Maia used to travel to Bahia to train with Luiz Dórea. It was there that he met Renato Velame, an MMA practitioner from Salvador, Bahia, who became a training partner.

Velame would years later become Jandiroba’s primary coach, and it was him who connected Jandiroba back to the man she was competitively replicating.

“Renato asked one day if Virna could come here to train a little bit, and I said, ‘of course, it would be a pleasure,’” Maia says. “So she came to Sāo Paulo. I have one of my partners here — a teacher, and one of my business partners — Márcia Souza. She understands about MMA also, she always saw me fighting, she trained in Thai boxing and she’s a black belt for many years. She was also helping, and I put her with Virna to help with some stuff.”

At UFC 314 in April, Virna Jandiroba dominated Yan Xiaonan on the ground with nearly 10 minutes of control time and landed 11-of-20 significant strikes.

(Megan Briggs via Getty Images)

This all took place before Jandiroba’s fight against Yan Xiaonan at UFC 314, which ended up being the penultimate test before this weekend’s title shot. Jandiroba looked better than ever in sweeping the scorecards, 30-27, shutting down completely a fighter who had her moments against the champ, Zhang.

As with the gradual emergence of Maia’s well-roundedness over time, Jandiroba took Xiaonan down and planted her there under variations of threats and fire for nearly 10 full minutes of a 15-minute fight. It was her most dominant showing to date, which is a hell of a thing for a 37-year-old fighter. To “get better with age” is a term better suited for sommeliers than it is for fighters.

Yet Maia himself had a late three-fight win streak while on the northside of 40, which turned him into a sort of ageless wonder in 2019, the very same year Jandiroba made her UFC debut.

“He’s someone that I really look up to and someone that I was lucky to be able to draw inspiration and knowledge from,” Jandiroba says. “I’ve been able to work with him here and there whenever I can. He brought in a lot of concepts and a lot of ideas that I can apply to MMA, some stuff that maybe it wasn’t as clear as it is now.

“Through his knowledge and his understanding of it, he was able to clear a lot of things up for me and help me maybe point me in the right direction. And even for this camp, [his partner] Márcia [Souza] came over to Bahia to train with me and help me for this camp. So he has been an important part of the development of even preparation for this fight.”

Though it was a competitive scrap, Dern won the first fight on the scorecards, taking two of the three rounds. Maia has known Dern since she was a 12-year-old girl traveling the world with her father, the decorated grappler Megaton Dias. He has witnessed her evolution, too, from super-green MMA practitioner to fully adapted contender. He says it’s been “fun” to watch.

Yet at an elevated remove, Maia can’t help but see a little of himself in Jandiroba, his self-proclaimed female edition, who will try to do what he never could.

That is, win a UFC title. When Maia faced Silva in Abu Dhabi 15 years ago, Silva won a decision that could generously be described as performative art. He danced and clowned and rarely put a combo together with any kind of bad intention. Dana White was so mad afterward he threatened to cut Silva if he ever pulled a stunt like that again.

Yet Maia himself was resilient. He got another chance against Tyron Woodley seven years later, just a few months short of his 40th birthday.

For him, it wasn’t to be.

For Jandiroba? Maia’s hoping that’s the one key difference between them.

“The people who love to learn, love to evolve, like I’ve seen Virna do, that is what it’s about,” he says.

“Sometimes when people are losing a fight, they start to give up, they look for a way out, and I was never like that, and I see that in her. She’s very tenacious, and she’s smart. She’s very smart in using her jiu-jitsu and understanding the features of using jiu-jitsu in a good way, even with this modern MMA. If you know how to use jiu-jitsu, you will be very proficient.”

It takes a high IQ fighter to know one. Virna Jandiroba knows Demian Maia.

And Maia knows what he sees.