Ricardo Arona

Nicknamed Brazilian Tiger, Ricardo Arona was born on July 17th, 1978 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Weighing 200 lbs and standing 5'1" tall, Ricardo is know for his Jiu-Jitsu and kickboxing style of fighting.  Arona is physically strong and a lot of pugilists and critics have criticized him for his style of fighting.  Defensive in his style, Arona prefers to push his opponents down early in the game and wait for a decision to come to his favor.

Ricardo made his MMA debut in the ADCC Submission Wrestling World Championship .  He won the open weight as well as the 92 Kilogram event in this championship thus establishing a record of being the only fighter to have won the championship and staying unbeaten as yet.

The Abu Dhabi gave Ricardo a very good foundation to step into RINGS, a Japanese promotion of the Mixed Martial Arts fighting.  Ricardo had a competitive 3-1 Win Loss record in the RINGS.  His only loss was against the fancied Fedor Emelinenko (Fedor then went on to clinch the PRIDE Heavyweight Championship).  He defeated Jeremy Horn, Andrei Kopylov , Gustavo Machado and many others before he was signed by PRIDE.

Ricardo made his PRIDE debut at the PRIDE 16 event held in September, 2001.  He knocked out his first opponent Guy Mezger by means of a split decision.  His victories in succession over Dan Henserson and Muril Rua are talked about till now due to the challenge these fighters posed to the strategy of Ricardo.  Ricardo won both these fights by means of decisions. 

This took him heads-on with Quinton Jackson.  Quinton was essentially the quicker of the two men and he could get out of Ricardo's grapples really fast.  This did not allow Ricardo to pin Quinton down to ground as he normally does.  As the match wore on, Quinton slapped a slam knockout on Ricardo that caused his defeat. 

This loss was followed by consecutive wins against Sergy Ignatov, Dean Lister, Kazushi Sakuraba and the much fancied, Wanderlei Silva.  The fight against Wanderlei Silva was a classic battle that went on for close to 5 minutes as both the fighters slugged it out to gain the upper hand.  In the end, Ricardo won due to his technical superiority in grappling allowing Silva to be defeated for the first time in PRIDE. 

This victory meant Ricardo was to face a strong Mauricio Rua.  Mauricio absolutely overpowered Ricardo in the final match and dominated the match right from the start.  Rua handed successive strikes to Ricardo that meant Ricardo could not claim his first PRIDE title. 

This match set the scene for Ricardo to lose couple of games due to his over-reliance on the one dimensional fight strategy.  His latest game against Rameu Sokoudjou in PRIDE 34 was an absolute shocker when he had to endure a slamdown by the less fancied Rameu.  The fight was over in less than 2 minutes and Rameu was declared the winner.

Ricardo has a 13-5 win loss record in MMA fighting.  Unless, he comes up with a change in strategy that will allow him to submit or knockout opponents, things look bleak for Ricardo this season.  His record of having 8 decision wins out of the 13 is good but eye-opening for Ricardo.