Mayssa Bastos will now be making her ONE Championship debut against Kanae Yamada at ONE Fight Night 20 on March 8th, 2024. The promotion has put together the event in order to celebrate International Women’s Day and as a result, every single match on the card is between female competitors. As always with ONE Championship events, there will be a mixture of different combat sports rulesets being used throughout the card with MMA, Kickboxing, and Muay Thai fights taking place. This match between Bastos and Yamada will be the only submission grappling match on the card however, and it is being contested in the atomweight division.
Signing Mayssa Bastos is a huge moment for ONE Championship, as she’s undoubtedly one of the best female grapplers on the planet right now. She enjoyed a dominant year in 2023 that saw her win every single major IBJJF event in the gi, along with both the Abu Dhabi World Pro and the IBJJF No Gi World Championship too. Over the course of the year she had 22 matches and won every single one of them, beating all of the major opposition that she has in her weight class. Her last competitive outing was at the IBJJF European Championship at the start of this year and seeing as she left with a silver medal, Bastos will probably eager to restart her winning streak.
Her opponent is no easy match though, as Kanae Yamada is one of the top grapplers coming out of Japan right now. She put on a great performance at the ADCC Asia and Oceania Trials last year, where she won a silver medal in the under 55kg division. Her only loss of that tournament came against an incredibly tough opponent, former ADCC Trials winner Adele Fornarino. This is a huge opportunity for Yamada to get her name out there in the professional grappling world, so she’ll undoubtedly be throwing everything she has at Bastos in order to get the win.
ONE Championship announced the news that Mayssa Bastos would be making her promotional debut at ONE Fight Night 20 in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
