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Fairtex has announced it will begin promoting at Lumpinee Stadium, starting in January, including MMA shows. So... that's happening. They also explicitly state "all genders," making them the second promotion to include women at the stadium (currently GoSport is the only promotion including women there). A Muay Thai Reaction As for how the New New Lumpinee, with its focus on omitting gambling and including very different promotions, one reaction from Thai fans is expressed in this post from a popular Thai Language news page. It says: Lumpinee will accept 3 rounds, 5 rounds, 6 rounds, female fighters, MMA, concerts - everything but gambling. (I assume the 6 round fights are boxing.)

I understand that we are talking about broadening the scope of viewership, and even the very identity of Thailand's Muay Thai. One can never really be sure if something new is coming to save, or destroy something old or traditional that is waning. I really believe that, but we do need to keep track of where this is going. It's worth noting that Fairtex Pattaya also hosted something called Fight Circus, a bunch of oddity fights November 6th, streamed to the adult cam site Camsoda, and tweeted out in parts. You can read about this show, and see more event examples here Bloody Elbow: Fight Circus 3 videos: Watch insane ‘Siamese kickboxing,’ literal phone booth fighting, more oddities. Pretty incredibly Australian Muay Thai fighter Celest Hansen fought a Phone Booth "Leithwei" fight, streamed 8 days before she became part of the first female bout to fight in the Lumpinee Stadium ring, a huge historic moment in the Muay Thai Thailand. It's highly unlikely that this Phone Booth fight was filmed when streamed, so near the Lumpinee fight, as Celest is cut in the video. It was probably just fed into the Nov 6th stream as if live, or tweeted it out then; who can tell. Celest lives in Phuket, not Pattaya, and again this was only 8 days before she entered the ring at Lumpinee Stadium. But, in the context of changes coming to Thailand's Muay Thai the juxtaposition of the two fights in time is striking. Here is "Siamese Kickboxing" tweeted out from the oddities show. Here Celest is coming out of the Lumpinee ring 8 days after the stream, making huge history, photo series here: You can see Celest fighting the historic fight at Lumpinee on November 13th here [full fight]: The fight oddities streaming show was put on, separately, at Faritex many hours before another historic fight in the evening, also hosted at Fairtex: the WBC World Championship between Souris Manfredi and Dangkongfah. This epic fight marked the first time the new WBC female Muay Thai rankings resulted in a Westerner vs Thai World Championship, which you can see here. In the day fight oddities, in the evening a big WBC female title fight: Aside from the sheer toughness and badassness of Celest being in both of these events, it also provides a jarring snapshot into just how far we can be stretching the tradition <<<>>>new eyeballs spectrum. MMA isn't even the full limit of "extreme" in that reach. And also it brings into view the unique place female fighters find themselves within it. Female fighting, as legitimate, became internationally stamped as legitimate through MMA,, and the transformations that Ronda Rousey forced open in the UFC. Then headlining female fights were embraced by ONE Championship, in some imitation of the UFC, and then by Fairtex itself who set upon creating a female MMA fight team - one of the first in Thailand to do so - starting with Stamp Fairtex. Female fighters in a certain respect represent, or even embody the possibility of new, modern fighting. But as in this case, with commericialization and the need to reach new audiences, one also risks farce and even circus. This occurs just as when female fighters themselves yearn for and reach to be integrated in the traditions and honor of Lumpinee which has excluded them. What does it mean for MMA to be included in Lumpinee? It's a really interesting question with no simple answer.

In a bit of history, Sylvie reported on the early MMA scene in Thailand way back in 2016 when ONE Championship put on a combination MMA and rock concert event in Bangkok. At the time MMA was, I believe, illegal in the country as it was seen as a threat to Muay Thai heritage, but Chatri and ONE managed to get an exception (or even change the law, I'm not sure). Sylvie's article including an interview with a Thai MMA fighter who was working his way through the very early scene. Some are pointing out that the new announcements regarding New New Lumpinee includes Lumpinee concerts. Perhaps they are thinking of doing similar concert + combat sport events. Read the article here: Insight into Thailand’s MMA Scene – Interview with MMA Fighter Itti Chantrakoon You can see Sylvie's 2016 interview with one of Thailand's proto-MMA fighters here:

Oh I love that I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT...................but I will learn

Gambling and Thailand are one in the same You can not remove it form Muay Thai ..or from betting on two rain drops on a window it is completely ingrained in their culture

This is the historic very first Female Fight IN Lumpinee Stadium overcoming the half-century long prohibition. Between Nong Neuk RR GilaKhorat (Thailand) and Celest Hansen (Australia). if the video does not play, click here

One of the challenges of building a female fight history is actually compiling the records and events of female fighting in such a way that pictures of the sports emerge and tell significant stories. Female professional fighting has been so fragmented and silo'd, driven by imitations of much more prevalent and organized male versions of combat sports, the bench marks of excellence become isolated and often just largely untold. It really was this landscape of female fighting - and for Sylvie pro female Muay Thai fighting - that gave her to take much more hardcoded benchmarks of excellence. Instead of belts accumulated by this org or that, it became immutable things like fighting itself, in a creative process of self-improvement and pursuit of excellence. And also for this reason, she has documented each and everyone of her fights, with as much detail as possible: complete Fight Record. The net result of this extremely committed devotion to fighting itself, match up after match up, taking never heard of before weight differences, has placed her achievement at the top of all pro female fight history, in terms of number of documented fights fought. Below are graphics positioning her fight achievement in the context of other milestone female pro fighters in their respective sports. All of these women deserve to be celebrated, because all of them pushed past limits that defined them, and their opportunities. Each fighter was in a different historical context. The asterisks above reflect the account that Masako Yoshida had 44 MMA fights but also 2 other fights (boxing & shootbox), and that Sakoto Shinashi had among her Tapeology 44 MMA fights a shootbox fight included. source Reddit NOTE: The graphic above has something of an error. Iman Barlow's wikipedia page only has 60 of her reported 93 pro MT fights documented. There may be documentation, she certainly is a historic female fighter, but at least by wikipedia she isn't available. The tildes above reflect the ambiguities in the Wikipedia records of these fighters. Iman Barlow counts 103 fights, but it is unclear how many of these are amateur. The amateur records of Valentina and Joanna also seem incomplete. Sylvie's current fight total is 268 fights (including 9 amateur Muay Thai fights). As noted, female Thai Muay Thai fighters have careers that sometimes stretch into the 100s. For instance prodigious Loma in this interview in 2018 said she probably had over 200 professional fights. Phettae in this 2021 interview said she likely had near 400, each fighting for purses since childhood. Sadly, the documentation on these careers is largely lost to oral history. It's very hard to tell what these guessed-at numbers reflect, but it is very likely that fighting well over 100 times is more that reachable for the most prolific Thai female fighters of Thailand, and for some may rarely stretch into the multiples of 100. It's one reason why Thai female fighters are many of the very best fighters in the history of the world. I'm looking into older female fighter combat sport histories, which I hope to a pull into the picture prolific female fighters. In this end these kinds of fight total histories add to the other storied histories in female combat sports. Belts won, big fights and showdowns witnessed. In the very end just getting into the ring an enormous number of times holds its own measure that says something about a fighter. For those less familiar with Sylvie and do not know the context of her record, she's fought (at the time of this writing) 1,1008 rounds and only been knocked to the canvas 1 time, despite accumulating 91 KO/TKOs, and has faced Internationally ranked, world champions, or local stadium champions 131 times. And over the last 100 fights averaged opponents 3 weight classes above her proper weight class. She has fought in the absolute degree-of-difficulty echelon of her opportunity as a pro female fighter. If there are details that are incorrect, or fight histories that can be more thoroughly filled in please let me know. The true goal is building an accurate and dynamic female history of combat sports.