Every Light-Heavyweight Champion That Reigned as Heavyweight King as Alex Pereira Bids for Immortality
Ciryl Gane is somewhere in a Parisian gym right now — movement sharp, footwork metronomic, that sniper rifle-like striking that was giving Tom Aspinall fits in their recent heavyweight title clash in Abu Dhabi still as dangerous as ever. He knows what’s coming on June 14th on the lawn of the most famous building in America.
He knows Alex Pereira’s left hook has ended careers at two different weight classes. And he knows that if Poatan walks onto the grounds of the White House at UFC Freedom 250 and adds heavyweight gold to his middleweight and light-heavyweight titles, the sport’s record books get rewritten around a Brazilian striker who wasn’t even doing MMA a decade ago.
Those are the stakes. Alex Pereira — a kickboxer who only found the UFC in his 30s — holds the distinct possibility of becoming the first three-division champion the UFC has ever seen. Poatan vacated his light-heavyweight belt to chase this. He left the 205-pound throne — a division where he was still untouchable — because apparently two belts aren’t enough when immortality is on the table. And the bookies think that he may very well get the job done.
The bookies currently make the fight a genuine pick ’em, with both fighters currently priced at -110. Using a no vig fair calculator, which shows a selection’s true odds without the bookmaker’s edge, it’s clear to see that both men would be priced at even money. Basically, the oddsmakers cannot split the two. But luckily for Pereira, the blueprint for a light-heavyweight-to-heavyweight transition has already been laid. Here are three men he can look to for inspiration as he aims to become the new interim heavyweight champion of the world.
Randy Couture’s Sheer Defiance
The year is 2003. Randy Couture has already been knocked out twice — Tim Sylvia finishing him, losing the heavyweight belt, the whole brutal arithmetic of a career that should’ve been winding down. Nobody seriously thinks he’ll beat Chuck Liddell at UFC 43. The Iceman is a wrecking ball with footwork; wrestling against that kind of power is begging to get caught.
Then Couture just doesn’t get caught. He cuts off the Octagon, smothers Chuck’s power at the clinch, drags the fight into the muck where wrestling pedigree beats striking wizardry, and finishes via full mount TKO to become the first UFC fighter in history to win titles in two weight classes—the defiance of it.
The Liddell trilogy eventually told the fuller truth. Two KO losses — first at UFC 52, then again at UFC 57 — exposed the ceiling: brilliant wrestling can lose to one-punch knockout power when the power is extraordinary enough. Yet the comeback at age 43 remains one of MMA’s most surreal moments.
UFC 68, February 2007. Six-foot-eight Tim Sylvia on the canvas inside eight seconds. Couture floors a man who outweighs him by thirty pounds, then out-boxes him for five rounds to a 50-45 universal decision and a record third UFC heavyweight title. How does a 43-year-old rewrite the script? He refuses to accept the one that was written for him.
Daniel Cormier’s Haunted Title Reigns
Daniel Cormier never asked to be a light-heavyweight. He dropped to 205 out of loyalty to teammate Cain Velasquez — a man he refused to square off against at heavyweight — and spent the rest of his UFC career paying for it in the most psychologically brutal way possible: Jon Jones.
UFC 187, Daniel Cormier finally claimed the light-heavyweight title with a dominant victory against the late-great Anthony Johnson. He would go on to defend the strap three times, but only because his nemesis had to vacate the throne.
Jones is the ghost in every press conference. The pair had hated each other since a backstage confrontation at UFC 121 years earlier — pure seething, personal contempt, the kind of rivalry that stopped being about titles long ago. UFC 182: UD victory for Jonny Bones. He vacates the title, allowing Cormier to swoop in, only for Jones to head-kick DC unconscious in Anaheim and reclaim the strap.
DC sits at the post-fight presser after that second bitter defeat with the look of a man whose chest has been hollowed out. The hatred isn’t performance. It’s real, accumulated, carved into his face. Then Jones fails a USADA test, and UFC 214 gets overturned to a no-contest. Cormier never gets the clean KO loss. He gets something worse: ambiguity that nobody on either side can live with.
What came next was something nobody expected: a heavyweight title run. UFC 226: one-round KO of Stipe Miocic — the greatest heavyweight the UFC has produced — making DC only the second simultaneous two-belt champ in company history. He submits Derrick Lewis at UFC 230. Then Miocic cracks him in the fourth round of the rematch and takes the gold back. The ending is blunt. The legacy is enormous and yet somehow incomplete because one name sits atop it like a stone. Jones didn’t just beat Daniel Cormier. He haunted him, twice taking his soul, and never giving Cormier a third chance in his optimum weight class.
Jonny Bones’ Troubled Masterpiece
on Jones. Greatest of all time? Almost certainly. Greatest opponent he ever faced? Himself.
Eleven light-heavyweight title defenses. A 1,501-day reign. Unorthodox elbows, wrestling chains, submission threats layered under a striking game that adapted to every opponent. UFC 128: twenty-three years old, destroys Maurício Rua in three rounds to become the youngest champion in company history. What followed was the most dominant divisional reign in UFC history — and simultaneously one of the most exhausting off-cage sagas the sport has ever endured, with various controversies leading to years of compulsory absence when Jones was physically at his absolute peak.
The Dominick Reyes fight in 2020 enraged half the sport — most observers scored it for Reyes, Jones kept the belt via UD, and suddenly the invincibility had a crack everyone could see.
The heavyweight transition felt inevitable, even if it took four years to actually materialize. UFC 285: first-round rear-naked choke on Ciryl Gane — that Ciryl Gane that Pereira fights in June — to claim heavyweight gold. UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden: a spinning back kick into Stipe Miocic’s ribs in round three, and Jones had finished the greatest heavyweight champion in history, albeit a version that was years past its best.
