Holly Holm claimed Ronda Rousey was beatable before her first UFC match

Even before her first fight with Raquel Pennington at UFC 184, UFC women’s bantamweight champion Holly Holm claimed Ronda Rousey was beatable. In a video interview before her UFC debut, Holm had much praise for the champ at that time but knew she was beatable.

“I think she’s great, she’s ran through everybody and made it look easy,” Holm said of Rousey. “Is it tough to beat her? Absolutely. I think everybody’s tried to bring their best game. But on the flip side, everyone is beatable. Everybody’s human and everybody’s beatable.

“I think the biggest thing for me if I think about a fight that big,” Holm said, “is you have to walk in there believing in yourself. This is how I’ve always felt from the very beginning of my career. If you don’t even feel like you can do it, you shouldn’t be in there, because you’ve already lost mentally.”

Holm walked into her fight at UFC 193 with that exact mentality and it proved to be a winning formula with a stunning knockout of the heavily favored Ronda Rousey.

With the expectation that there will be an immediate rematch, Holm said in her appearance on “Good Morning America,” “I’ll train twice as hard as I did for the first one, because I know she’ll be coming back.”