Christian “The Warrior” Lee’s tour de force in the ONE Championship lightweight division continues, and it looks like nothing can stop him anytime soon.
The ONE Lightweight World Champion needed less than 90 seconds to dispatch no. 3-ranked contender Timofey Nastyukhin in the main event of the previously-recorded “ONE on TNT II”, which aired on Thursday, 15 April.
After a brief feeling-out process to open the match, Lee slipped Nastyukhin’s right hook. He then countered with a short left of his own to floor the Russian and set the stage for another quick finish.
Nastyukhin tried to recover by going on his back, but “The Warrior” responded by sending more than 10 unanswered punches to the side of his head. That prompted referee Mohammad Sulaiman to stop the bout at the 1:13 mark of the first round.
“He’s a dangerous opponent. He likes to go in there and he likes to go for a knockout. Our game plan was to capitalize on that. Speed and accuracy beat power — that’s what happened tonight,” Lee told Mitch Chilson after the match.
“This is something that my dad and my brother and I were drilling over and over just now in the back room. We were planning on ducking those punches, countering and going for the takedown. Thankfully, the punch landed clean, and I was able to secure the finish right there.”
Lee improved to 15-3 with the victory, as he defended the World Title for the second time.
The 22-year-old felt highly motivated to win this match given the sacrifices he had to make. He even had to leave his pregnant wife to focus on training for this match.
But the juice is always worth the squeeze, as Lee found out after this short match that he dedicated to his wife and future daughter.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better story, really. I trained for 10 really hard weeks leading up to this match. This was the most important fight of my life,” Lee said.
“Very soon, I’m gonna become a father, so this fight is dedicated to my baby girl and my wife, Katie, back at home. It’s very hard to go away and leave them, but later this month we’ll be having our first baby, so this fight was for them.”
In the co-main event, ONE Kickboxing Atomweight World Champion Janet “JT” Todd continued her rise in Muay Thai. She dispatched Anne “Ninjaline” Line Hogstad in the third round of their bout.
A beautiful left kick to the liver cut Hogstad down, and even the referee’s mandatory eight count wasn’t enough to give her time to recover. Todd then earned her second-straight win in Muay Thai.
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