Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu: The Most Pro Fights By A Female Fighter in History

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

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.

 

[Guest Mike from Toronto]

Hey guys - just found this forum. Amazing documentation into something very unique. Wish you guys the best. 

[Tom Riddle]

Great content. I always love reading your posts. They are so informational and stratifying.