Julianna Pena was unable to present the best version of herself at UFC 316.
That’s because the “Venezuelan Vixen” was plagued with “several injuries” while training for her Kayla Harrison title fight, forcing the former UFC bantamweight titleholder to enter the Octagon with a “severe handicap” against the ex-PFL champion.
“I was plagued with several injuries leading up to that fight,” Pena told The Ariel Helwani Show (transcribed by Farah Hannoun). ”It was not a good camp for me in that sense because I knew that I was going into the fight with a pretty severe handicap. It crossed my mind [to pull out], but it was not bad enough to the point where I would have to not fight because I knew I was going to be able to push through.”
“But it’s a funny thing that my coaches probably didn’t explain the severity of the situation to me, otherwise I would have thought more heavily on not competing,” Pena added. “I don’t regret competing. I put in too much time. I’ve taken away too much time from other people, from my daughter, from my coaches, and from their families. So I don’t regret competing. I just wish I could have competed under better circumstances.”
Pena, 35, was submitted by Harrison in the second stanza after weeks of back-and-forth trash talk. Coming up short against the Olympian cost The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) 18 champion the opportunity to secure a rubber match against Amanda Nunes.
“Lioness” is expected to make her UFC return later this year.
“About the second week of May, I broke my thumb on my training partner, and it was swollen,” Pena continued. “It looked like someone hit me in the hand with a hammer, and it was really difficult to grip. It still is right now very difficult to grip and to have grip strength. But then the 29th of May, I took a really bad fall in the octagon, and I tore my elbow and broke off a ton of bone chips so that I wasn’t able to straighten my arm or bend my arm fully. I worked on that for a few days before I left to fight week, but everyday it was just worse and worse and worse.”
“It looked like someone whacked me in the back of the elbow with a baseball bat,” Pena said. “It was just so swollen, and the MRI, the X-rays showed a tear and a lot of bone chips in the back of that. So going into a fight 10 days out after having a tear like that and all those bone chips, it’s just excruciating, and it’s very painful. It’s hard to throw a punch, it’s hard to extend, it’s hard to grip, it’s hard to bend. It’s just all-around very painful. I’m having surgery for that in July, and I’m going to clean that up.”
“Knowing that I was going into the fight with that big of a handicap definitely sucked,” Pena said. “But then lo and behold, that’s actually the same arm that she isolated and was able to Kimura, so I had no strength to be able to fight that — and with five seconds left in the round! It’s humiliating, it’s embarrassing, and it sucks; but oh well, live to fight another day.”
Pena (12-6) is unlikely to make her UFC return until early 2026.
