Most importantly, that’s why Vanderaa took this fight on short notice after Ilir Latifi was forced to withdraw. The 29-year-old needs a victory after a 1-3 start to his UFC career, and following a controversial split decision loss to Andrei Arlovski in February, a quick turnaround was just what the doctor ordered for Vanderaa, who was looking to get a fight, short notice or not, saying, “I was trying to get Alan Baudot, and I called him out. That seemed like a fun fight. And then out of nowhere, my manager calls like, ‘Hey, you want to fight Aleksei Oleinik?’ Yeah. I don’t know why, but it seems like a fun time.”
Arlovski wasn’t necessarily a fun time for Vanderaa, even though he was in there with one of his fighting heroes and nearly left with his hand raised. Two judges didn’t agree, and while Vanderaa believes he won, he knows that he could have taken that verdict out of their hands, declaring, “Now looking at the fight, I could have done a little bit more, just a little bit more. If I got a takedown in the second round, and got position, hold him down for like ten seconds, that alone could have been enough for the judges to be like, ‘He won this round.’ So if I maybe took him down, it might have changed the fight. It’s one of those hard pills to swallow. I don’t want to be like… I could have done more, I should have done more, but I didn’t. And that’s my fault. I’m not gonna sit there and be like, ‘How could the judges have robbed me?’ I gave the judges a reason to allow the robbing, and that’s my fault. It sucks and no one wants to hear it, but it happened.
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Until the final decision was read, Vanderaa showed glimpses of the form that got him to the UFC in the first place after a first-round finish of Harry Hunsucker on Dana White’s Contender Series in late-2020.
