Athletes
Alice Ardelean: Weathering The Storm
After A Turbuelent Camp And A Narrow UFC Debut Loss, Alice Ardelean Is Ready To Prove Her Resilience At UFC Fight Night: Hernandez vs Pereira
It’s apparently not always sunny in Florida. Alice Ardelean found that out the hard way as she waited in Orlando for Hurricane Milton to hit last week.
The Birmingham-based Romanian had traveled to the U.S. to prepare with the Fusion X-Cel squad for this Saturday’s bout with Melissa Martinez, and while camp had gone off without a hitch, this little wrench in the works wasn’t expected. But on October 8th, Ardelean was cool.
“I'm probably going to s**t myself in the middle of the night, but now I'm laughing,” she said. “But watch me later when the s**t's going to hit the fan.”
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It’s safe to assume Ardelean’s humor and positive attitude are what gets her through the craziness the world can throw at her and everybody else. It got her through Milton, and she made it to Las Vegas safely and made weight without any issues. But as the saying goes, there’s always something, and back in the UK, thieves broke into the home she shares with her parents and threatened them at knifepoint to hand over the keys to her car.
“I just cannot have a bit of peace and quiet,” Ardelean said. “S**t happens everywhere. This (Milton) is a natural disaster, the UK was crime. That's what I'm saying: I just need a bit of peace. I just want to fight and go back home.”
Fight fans are waiting to see what the 32-year-old brings to the Octagon this weekend in her second UFC bout. In July, she took a short-notice bout with Ireland’s Shauna Bannon and lost a split decision, but with a full camp, she expects to show off the form that led her to a five-fight winning streak leading up to her UFC debut. And being with Julien Williams and Fusion X-Cel for a month have her confident that the second impression will be a positive one.
“I was very comfortable in the UK,” Ardelean said. “I just wanted to get out of my comfort zone. I said, I'm going to do everything that's in my power to have a nice weight cut and a nice preparation for the fight. I felt like I was home before. I was nice with my family, going to training, coming back, and I'm like, I want to be uncomfortable. So that's why I came here. And obviously the team here is amazing. I was here back in February, and I was so impressed about this gym. They have a lot of UFC fighters and I'm not even surprised. The level, even to compare to the UK, is absolutely sky and Earth. So I've been working hard, and there are a lot of girls that I can spar with here, as well.”
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Ardelean is currently thinking about making a permanent move to Florida, hurricanes be damned, and bringing mom and dad along for the ride. It shows the commitment Ardelean has to the game, where she believes she’s only scratching the surface of what she can do. And with a top-level team continuing to evolve her game, that will only help her make a mark in an always competitive strawweight division. But one thing they can’t give Ardelean is heart or work ethic, and luckily, she’s got both, because it hasn’t been an easy road to get to this point in her career.
“I've been broke,” she said. “I worked and went to training. And unless you're a super extra talented person and you don't need that much training, you're talented and you can go work and your career will pop. But that’s not the case for me, because I am not athletic. I have to work super, super hard. I can't even do pushups and pull-ups. I'm the worst athlete. People go, yeah, don't talk so bad about yourself. It's not about talking bad about myself. I can fight. I have that fire in my heart. I love to fight. I love to get punched, I don't mind, but I'm not an athletic person. Everything is hard for me. I'm just a chubby person if I'm out of camp. But I will always be there in the gym. I wanted so bad to fight in the UFC or get to the end point, whatever that was back then when I was thinking about it. And I'm like, I'm going to do everything in order for this to happen.”
It’s happened. And while a 9-6 pro record doesn’t jump off the page at you, consider that Ardelean fought UFC vets (and one world champion) Cristina Stanciu, Diana Belbita and Zhang Weili before getting the call, and that after losing to Zhang in 2016, she won five in a row, finishing four of those victories. So she’s getting better at the perfect time, and she’s willing to make the sacrifices necessary to keep moving forward. And that’s not easy, either.
“I've been there and I've done that, and I'm doing this,” Ardelean said. “If I'm thinking back, I would never give up this life for nothing. But this life also comes with a lot of sacrifices. Look at me, I'm in Orlando and my family's back there. I want to stay with my family. Sometimes there's a wedding and I have to go there, but I cannot have cake, or I cannot even go to the wedding because I’m in fight camp. So it all comes with sacrifices. Some people don't want to do these type of sacrifices or go to train. It hurts. I hate it. It hurts because it's hard, it's exhausting, and it's actually painful to the body, all this cardio and everything. I don’t think a lot of people can do this.”
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You’re probably invested in Ardelean’s story by now, and if you’re not, well, over three million TikTok followers are. And most of them thought she was just a funny young lady from Romania when she started posting memes and comedy videos. But once they found out that she was a prizefighter, as well, things took off into the stratosphere.
“When my TikTok popped, I made a connection because I was posting only funny content on my TikTok at that time,” she said. “And I popped, had a lot of followers. And then after that, after I was already viral because of my reactions (videos), I had a fight coming up and I started to advertise my fight. And everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, are you a fighter?’ And these are people that are not into any sports. These are normal, day-to-day people who have nothing to do with sports. And I brought sports and MMA into their lives, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, the girl with the eyes is an MMA fighter? We are going to root for you.’ And that's how I kind of started to get these people that are actually supporting me.”
They’ve stayed on board and her TikTok following is only growing. It’s easy to see why, because in a world of negativity, Ardelean gives her fans something to smile and laugh about.
“I was reading through the comments, and I was seeing a lot of people saying, ‘I was depressed, I was super sad. But scrolling through your content, you bring joy.’ And I guess that I'm delivering positive stuff, obviously next to my booty shake and my MMA. I'm assuming that's why I have so many people that like me. I'm being me. I'm not trying to be fake. If you look on my page, I'm not going to always post, oh, happy me, or oh, Alice, the fit one. If I wake up in the morning with a big ass head, I will post that because that's me. That's still a part of me. So I'm a really real person. What you see is what you get.”
That reality is attached to a story that hopefully winds up in a book someday.
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“I would've s**t loads to say,” she laughs. But first, business, and that business is doing whatever it takes to get her first UFC win against Martinez on Saturday. She’s done everything necessary to put herself in position to hit her mark, survived a hurricane and getting her car stolen, and now it’s time to fight.
That’s the fun part.
“I feel great,” Ardelean said. “I feel so fit. I lost so much weight, and I have such a great team around me. The training is super hard, but I've been putting the work in every single day and I can really say I had a proper camp. I'm happy about that. So I'm going to deliver a great performance. It's going to be a nice fight.”
UFC Fight Night: Hernandez vs Pereira, live from UFC APEX in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 19, 2024. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!
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