Bellator MMA It’s back to us tonight, June 16, 2023, for Bellator 297, coming down live from the Wintrust Arena in Chicago, Illinois.
Headlining the event is a lightweight championship bout between three-time defending champion Vadim Nemkov (17-2, 1 NC) and former three-time middleweight title challenger Yoel Romero (15-7).
Nemkov was coming off a dominant win over Corey Anderson in a rematch in November of last year, while Romero entered the match in a two-legged knockout series.
Keep reading to see how our tournament main event of the evening went down:
Official result: Vadim Nemkov defeated. Yoel Romero via unanimous decision (49-46, 49-46, 49-46)
The champ has a dominant opening five minutes, impressively edging Romero throughout. He invests in his body kicks early and lands good punches upstairs. He also hides nice head kicks behind some of these combos, though none fall flat at first.
Nemkov caught and dazzled Romero with two holeshot combinations at the end of the second round, and by this point, he had landed more than five times as many strokes as the challenger.
Nemkov continues to dominate across the middle stretch, he’s really starting to tag Romero badly this round.
Nemkov takes the championship rounds easily too, after the last eighty seconds or so of the fifth and final round where Romero manages to put Nemkov on his back and keep him there until the final bell.
Every time Vadim Nemkov fights, we wonder if he’s the best lightweight in the world right now.
We have to wonder how he’ll do against UFC champ Jamal Hill, or how his rematch with former UFC and Rizin champ Jiri Prochazka will go. Or how about Nemkov versus Magomed Ankalaev? After four title defenses, we have to hope he makes the promotional switch at some point in his career.
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I became a fan of combat sports when I was 12 years old. I was browsing channels and landed on Versus, which is where WEC was on TV. Uriah Faber fought Jens Pulver for the second time that night. This is the first fight I’ve ever seen, and I got addicted to it instantly. Eventually, I started covering the sport in the last quarter of 2018, and since then I’ve started writing about animals as well. If you’d like to see these pieces, be sure to check out learnaboutnature.com!