Kayla Harrison and Ronda Rousey are both legendary MMA fighters but long before that, they were also both competing and winning at the highest level of Judo too. Although their careers share plenty of similarities, they’ve also taken different paths at various points too. As it stands, they will both go down in history among the most successful American Judoka and female MMA fighters of all time and their respective legacies are pretty secure. Before either of them reached anywhere near that level in either of their sports, they actually met on the mats in competition as teenage Judo prospects.
The two women are separated by a couple of years and although that wouldn’t make any difference today, it has a sizeable impact for younger competitors. This match took place at the 2005 World Championships when Rousey was 18 and Harrison was just 15. It was just 3 years before Rousey won a bronze medal at the Olympics, becoming the first female American to medal at the event. She retired from Judo almost immediately afterward and started making the transition to MMA, making her amateur debut in 2010. Rousey’s rise was meteoric, as her professional debut less than a year later and became the StrikeForce world champion in another year.
By the end of 2012, Rousey became the first ever female UFC world champion and her dominant streak continued over the next 3 years. She finished her MMA career off with a pair of losses to retire at 12-2 before making the switch to the WWE, and hasn’t returned to combat sports since. At the same time that Ronda Rousey was being a women’s MMA pioneer, Kayla Harrison was focusing exclusively on her Judo career and setting a whole new standard. She not only won an Olympic gold medal in 2012 but she returned for a second title at the next edition in 2016.
Harrison made her own transition to MMA after that and has enjoyed even more success, dominating in the PFL for the first few years before eventually moving to the UFC. She became a two-time lightweight tournament champion at the PFL and already held an incredible 16-1 professional record by the time she made her UFC debut. She won her first two fights and earned a shot at the same bantamweight title that Rousey used to hold, submitting Julianna Pena and taking home the belt. Now she’s at the top of the food chain while Rousey remains retired, two decades after they faced each other in competition.
The full footage of Kayla Harrison vs Ronda Rousey in a Judo match was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of The Rowdy Ones:
