UFC 280 saw the long-awaited lightweight title fight between Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev finally transpire.
While Oliveira had been stripped of his title for missing weight at UFC 274, given the circumstances (a backstage scale had been tampered with, albeit inadvertently), most saw “Do Bronx” as the uncrowned king of the lightweight division. That gave Makhachev the role of challenger, though he entered the fight a moderate favorite.
The stacked UFC 280 card didn’t stop there, with Aljamain Sterling putting his bantamweight title on the line against T.J. Dillashaw. Himself a former two-time UFC champion at 135lbs, Dillashaw was looking for redemption, after seeing his last title reign come to an end when he was stripped of the belt for use of EPO, a banned PED made infamous by Lance Armstrong.
Petr Yan and Sean O’Malley, meanwhile, threw down in what was very likely a title eliminator to tap the next challenger at bantamweight.
UFC 280 took place on Saturday, October 22, 2022 at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Following the event, tune in for the post-fight press conference, featuring all the big winners from one of the biggest cards of the year. A live stream of the proceedings can be found in the embed above.
