When you sign a bout agreement to fight Joanna Jedrzejczyk, you agree to the possibility that you may well not look the same for quite some time.
The reigning UFC strawweight champion is a tornado of slicing Muay Thai in her fights, the last three of which have been 25 minutes of non-stop onslaught.
She might fight at 115lbs but her lack of size does not mean that she can’t deliver a brutal beating. Just ask her previous UFC opponents, all of whom have looked rather different after their experience with the fittingly nicknamed “Joanna Violence.”
That’s what makes Karolina Kowalkiewicz’s ability to withstand Jedrzejczyk’s punishment without showing much damage to her face after UFC 205’s five round title fight so very damn impressive.
Here’s how Kowalkiewicz looked after her war with JJ and, small haemotoma aside, she looked as good as new in defeat.
On the left you see the Polish challenger ahead of weigh-ins for the bout and, on the right, you can see how little punishment she was wearing when the time came to read the scorecards.
What makes that feat even more incredible is the below series of before and after photos of a selection of Jedrzejczyk’s UFC opponents to date.
Kowalkiewicz is certainly one of the luckier ones because fighting Jedrzejczyk looks like precisely zero fun.
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