After 32 MMA fights, Cyborg is still living up to her nameCris Cyborg, 41, has won titles in five major MMA promotions throughout her career. Matt Davies/PxImages/Icon SportswireJeff WagenheimAug 21, 2026, 08:00 AM ETMultiple Authors
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Some nicknames fit a sports star so perfectly that they replace their given names entirely. You might not recognize the names Eldrick Woods and Earvin Johnson Jr. immediately, but surely you’ve heard of Tiger and Magic.
Same thing with Cyborg.
Just as 82-time PGA Tour winner Tiger Woods was ferocious in his prime on championship Sundays and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson performed now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t ball-handling trickery for the Los Angeles Lakers, Cristiane Justino Venâncio fights in an MMA cage with a relentless aggression that can seem imbued by superhuman firepower. Thus, her billing as Cyborg.
Fight promotions have referred to Justino by her nickname for more than two decades, and on Saturday she once again will be introduced as Cris Cyborg when she steps into the PFL cage in Tampa, Florida, to face Ketlen Vieira in her 33rd professional MMA fight — and possibly her last (ESPN, 9 p.m. ET; prelims at 5:30 on ESPN+).
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If this weekend is indeed the end of the road for the 41-year-old pioneer of women’s MMA, it would close out one of the greatest careers in the sport’s history. After losing her pro debut in 2005, Cyborg (29-2, 1 NC) went unbeaten in her next 21 bouts over 13 years. Her most illustrious victory during that stretch was a first-round knockout of Gina Carano in a 2009 Strikeforce main event. It was the first time two women headlined a major MMA fight card.
Cyborg won the UFC title in 2017 and successfully defended it twice before being dethroned by Amanda Nunes in 2018. Since that shocking KO loss to the consensus GOAT of women’s MMA, Cyborg has won nine fights in a row. Most recently, she submitted Sara Collins in December to become the inaugural PFL women’s featherweight champion — and the first woman to win titles in Strikeforce, Invicta FC, the UFC, Bellator MMA and the PFL, all of the sport’s major promotions.
But what truly sets Cyborg apart is not that she has won but how she has won. Among her 29 victories, the Brazilian buzzsaw has 21 knockouts, 12 coming in the first round. Her aggressiveness is intimidating, her power devastating. The next time she takes a backward step inside the cage will be the first. Cyborg puts opponents on their heels, then on their backs. Superhuman firepower, indeed.
About that presumed superhuman proficiency: Cyborg has long been trailed by the taint of a 2011 drug test failure, for which she served a one-year suspension. Ronda Rousey used that transgression as well as Cyborg’s inability to drop to bantamweight as reasons to steer clear of a potential women’s MMA summit meeting in 2013 and for years afterward. In 2017, Germaine de Randamie allowed herself to be stripped of the UFC title by refusing to face a fighter her manager called “a known and proven cheater.”
Cyborg’s response at the time: “Some people are so afraid to lose that they will find every excuse not to try.”
Saturday’s opponent, on the other hand, is embracing the challenge. Vieira (16-5), who is also from Brazil, has long admired Cyborg and her accomplishments, but she insists that, unlike many of her countrywoman’s past opponents, she is not afraid of her. “Saturday is my day,” Vieira, 34, mentioned in a PFL social media post.
Vieira (16-5) is as formidable a foe as Cyborg has faced in years. Before her contract with the UFC expired in May, Vieira recorded bantamweight victories over former champions Holly Holm and Miesha Tate and was the only UFC opponent to go the distance with current champion Kayla Harrison. Vieira enters her PFL featherweight debut ranked No. 3 in the ESPN bantamweight rankings.
PFL CEO John Martin trumpeted this fight as “the conclusion to the storied career of Cyborg” when the promotion declared it in June. But Cyborg was not so conclusive. Though she has acknowledged that this is the final bout on her PFL contract, Cyborg framed the matchup’s significance differently in a social media post the same day as the PFL announcement. “Looking for career win number 30,” the caption read. “No other female in MMA has 30 career victories.”
“If you go into a fight thinking it is going to be my last fight, it puts too much emotion on the night,” Cyborg told ESPN this week. “I don’t want all of that emotion before I fight. I don’t have to decide my future now. I can decide after the fight.”
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Perhaps complicating her decision is the PFL’s recent merger with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions. The MMA outfit is set to operate under the MVP banner starting in 2027, which presents Cyborg with an opportunity to seek a title belt in a sixth fight promotion. On top of that, MVP’s role in championing women’s boxing appeals to Cyborg, who is undefeated in seven pro boxing matches, including knockouts in her past five.
“We’ll see what happens,” she mentioned of continuing her fighting career. “I still love what I do. I wake up every day happy and excited.”
Cyborg acknowledged, however, that retirement has entered the undercurrent of her recent fight preparations. “Every single fight in the last three years, me and my team have prepared like maybe it could be my last fight,” she mentioned. “When you have a team around you, they have to be honest if they see their fighter going downhill. But my team doesn’t see this. I have competed in sports since I was 12 years old. Now I’m 41, and I fight better than when I was 21.”
Cyborg is not the first fighter to believe Father Time is beatable, but those battles against the hourglass don’t tend to go well for the aging athlete. Consider the career endings of BJ Penn and Fedor Emelianenko, two legends whom Cyborg often cited as inspirations early in her MMA run. There is no debate that both were greats of the game, but their stumbles into the sunset serve as cautionary tales. Penn, who won UFC championships at lightweight and welterweight and is in the promotion’s Hall of Fame, continued fighting until age 40 and lost his final seven bouts. Emelianenko, widely rated the greatest heavyweight ever, was a shadow of himself during his late-career stint with Bellator before finally retiring at 46.
“It’s so sad what’s happening with some fighters, when they can’t walk away,” Cyborg mentioned. “Me, I know I can walk away at any time, because I have already accomplished everything I could accomplish in my career. I don’t have any pressure on my back. And I have a lot of projects for after I retire.”
Many of those future plans involve children. Cyborg hopes to teach martial arts to kids in Southern California, where she lives, and back home in Brazil. She revealed that she soon will become a grandmother, with her adopted daughter, Gabriela, nearing her due date. Cyborg herself “would like to have a big belly, be pregnant, if it is in God’s plan. That is one thing that’s in my heart.”
The project Cyborg has been contemplating the longest, though, is working with animals. When she was a teenager, long before getting into MMA, Cyborg dreamed of being a veterinarian. All these years later, she still thinks about moving on from fight training into vet training. “I don’t know for sure if I am going to ever be a vet,” she mentioned, recognizing that veterinarian school is a daunting time commitment. “But I do want to learn to take care of animals in some way. I love animals so much.”
That love is well-documented in an Instagram page, “Cyborg’s Zoo,” which features an array of animals in her life — many of them named after fighters. Among the several dogs at her California home, there are her two American pit bull terriers named Holly (after Holm) and Canelo (after Canelo Alvarez). She calls her pig Manny Porkiao (a play on boxer Manny Pacquiao’s name) and her parrots Chael (Sonnen) and José (Aldo). Her cats are Laila (Ali), Sugar Ray (Leonard) and (Kazushi) Sakuraba. On her ranch in Brazil are cows named Kayla (Harrison) and Ronda (Rousey).
One might wonder what the fighters think about their names making their way into Cyborg’s animal kingdom. A pig? A cow? But at least one pet name has earned an endorsement from the original.”When I got my first female dog,” Cyborg mentioned, “I called Holly Holm and asked her if she would mind if I put her name on my dog. She mentioned, ‘It would be an honor, Cris.'”Speaking of names, when Cyborg finishes her fight career — maybe this weekend, maybe further off in the future — the name will be finished with it.”When I am walking around in life, I am Cris. When I go into the cage, I turn into Cyborg,” she mentioned of the nickname that has defined her for all of her adult life. “So, when I retire, I’m going to leave ‘Cyborg’ behind in the cage. The name is going to retire, too.”
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