Amanda Ribas will have to go under the knife after a knockout loss this past Saturday at UFC Abu Dhabi, and Tabatha Ricci feels bad for the fellow Brazilian.
Ricci connected a vicious elbow to Ribas’ face in the second round of their strawweight bout on July 26. The strike displaced a metal plate that was inserted in the area in 2023, when Ribas suffered a mid-fight orbital bone fracture against Maycee Barber. Ricci admits she didn’t notice at the time that something serious had happened to her opponent.
“I was worried about Amanda, what happened to her eye, but I know she’s fine now and will do the surgery in Brazil,” Ricci told MMA Fighting. “I’m glad that she will have a good recovery and will be well treated.”
The medical team in Abu Dhabi initially planned to do the procedure on the day after the fight and then pushed it back to Monday, but eventually decided to send Ribas back to Brazil for the surgery.
“I didn’t know there was a fracture, a very serious one,” Ricci said. “In fact, I didn’t realize the elbow hit her in the eye because my head was under her chin and I was throwing the elbow. She got soft out of nowhere and started to go down. I thought, ‘Oh, it landed.’ But I didn’t know it landed in her eye. She got soft and I thought, ‘I’l take her down.’ I went for the leg to take her down and that’s when I saw her going down covering her face, so I started punching.”
Ricci said she saw Ribas backstage during a medical check-in at the Etihad Arena, and she appeared to be in good spirits.
“She had her eye covered up but she was fine, she had a good energy,” Ricci said. “Amanda is an athlete that knows how to win and lose, she’s a very nice person. I love her. … This sport is very dangerous, that could have been the other way around. It’s always a risk in there, right?”
Ricci said she expected to win by finish to rebound from a loss to Yan Xiaonan, and credits the decision defeat against “one of the best strikers in the division” for her evolution as a mixed martial artist.
“To share the octagon with [Yan] for three rounds was a huge experience for me,” Ricci said. “Losing to the No. 2 ranked, experiencing how it is up there [in the ranking] and coming back to train and see what I did wrong and have this victory, that’s amazing. Amanda is incredible, a veteran who’s been in the UFC for a long time and has fought great names, and I knew it would be a very important fight for me.”
Ricci climbed to the No. 7 in the official UFC rankings with the victory, and wants to continue fighting up.
“Mackenzie [Dern] also that just fought Amanda. Maybe they won’t give me her, they’ll instead wait for another fight,” Ricci said. “There’s also Jessica [Andrade] vs. Loopy [Godinez on Aug. 16], that would be a good fight too. I already fought Loopy, but I would love a rematch because I felt I won that fight, although it was a close one. It’s a good fight, really. The winner of that fight would be very interesting for me.”
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