Outside Source
Brazilian fans have always lamented the disproportion between the number of Brazilian fighters and Brazilian referees in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Even though Brazil has the second most athletes on the promotion’s roster, behind only the United States, after Mario Yamasaki withdrew from refereeing panels there was a period of several years during which no Brazilian referees were being used by American athletic commissions.
That changed in 2024 when former Shooto and Cage Rage champion, Vitor “Shaolin” Ribeiro, began to get the call more frequently. Thanks to his excellent performances and high accuracy, the black belt under Andre Pederneiras was chosen to referee the title fight between Joshua Van and Tatsuro Taira in the co-main event of UFC 328.
In an interview with Sherdog a month after the fight, Ribeiro commented on his decision to stop the fight at 1 minute and 32 seconds of the fifth round, giving the TKO win to Van. “It was a very good fight to referee where both had good moments until the fourth round, but when Taira took a sequence of 14 punches without returning any, I had no alternative but to stop it. Enough is enough,” analyzed the Brazilian, revealing that despite receiving some criticism, he remains fully convinced that he made the right decision. “I wasn’t going to let him fall unconscious with his face on the canvas by one more punch. The Japanese fighter is extremely tough mentally and didn’t want to give up, but as a referee I had to fulfill my role. It’s actions like this that can reduce a 10-or 15-year career to two years. A series of concussions can totally change the course of a career. Today the sport has betting and a lot involved so it’s natural to see more people complaining, but the referee is there to preserve the physical integrity of those who put on the show,” Shaolin stated.
As a four-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion with a 20-5 MMA record, having won two of the world’s most important lightweight titles of his era, Ribeiro emphasizes the importance of the referee preserving the athlete’s integrity, drawing a parallel between Taira and Van and his fight with Gesias Cavalcante at K-1 Heroes in 2007. “Like Taira, 20 years ago I had that old-school mentality of fighting to the death and never giving up. I took a very strong punch from Gesias that injured my eye (suffered retinal detachment), today I thank the referee for stopping it because my mentality was to fight to the death, just like Taira.”
The first MMA world champion from Nova Uniao, “Shaolin” also revealed to Sherdog that he played an important role in the early career of a talented boy from Amazonas who slept on the Nova Uniao mats and helped him a lot in his training to win the Cage Rage belt: Jose Aldo.
“In 2005, I had left Shooto and was fighting at Cage Rage in England, and the event offered two air tickets,” Ribeiro said. “One for sure was for [Andre] Pederneiras, so we had the idea of giving the other to ‘Junior’ [Aldo], who needed to implement his Sherdog account so “Dede” could take him abroad. After my fight, he stayed another month at my agent Alex’s house, who arranged two fights for him in local events (UK Fight Night and Battle of Britain). Aldo knocked both opponents out quickly, and it became easier for Dede to sell him to Pancrase and then WEC. I’m so proud to have helped him in the beginning, Junior is such a wonderful and talented guy”
Living in New York since 2008, “Shaolin” now divides his routine between jiu-jitsu classes at his academy in New Jersey and MMA refereeing. The Brazilian started refereeing amateur fights in 2014 and soon after was credentialed by the New York State Athletic Commission. Today, Ribeiro has already refereed nearly 200 fights, according to his Sherdog referee profile.
“My life has been dedicated to jiu-jitsu and then to MMA,” he said, “and I am extremely happy to be able to give back to the sport everything I received from it, whether by teaching my art or refereeing in MMA.”
This article first appeared at Recent News on Sherdog.com
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