Alan Baudot

Alan Baudot is a French heavyweight born in Lyon in 1988 to parents from Martinique, whose path to fighting was anything but conventional. After moving to the Japanese countryside as a child and starting judo, he developed a love for combat sports and at 22 took a leap of faith, emigrating to Japan to start a business with a friend. When that entrepreneurial dream collapsed, Baudot found refuge in MMA in 2013 at Hayato Sakurai's gym in Tokyo, winning his debut fight while working nights as a bouncer in the Roppongi district. It was there he earned the nickname 'The Black Samurai'. After a seven-month break and return to France in 2016, Baudot joined the elite MMA Factory stable under coach Fernand Lopez and built an impressive record punctuated by knockout power and first-round finishes, eventually earning a title in Japan's HEAT promotion.

Baudot's UFC journey, which began in October 2020 as a short-notice replacement against Tom Aspinall, told a different story. Brought in on four days' notice to face the future heavyweight champion, Baudot was overwhelmed in 95 seconds of brutal ground strikes and never recovered from that debut loss. Over his next four UFC fights, he went 1-3 (with one result overturned to a no contest when his opponent failed a drug test), losing decisive rounds to better-rounded strikers like Parker Porter and Josh Parisian. His record shows he is a power-puncher first and foremost: 7 of his 8 wins came by knockout, with 5 finished in the first round. But at the UFC level, where striking defense and durability matter just as much as raw power, Baudot repeatedly came up short.

Released from the UFC in July 2022 after his loss to Parisian, Baudot has not fought since. He remained active in the Paris MMA community, reportedly serving as a sparring and training partner for his MMA Factory teammate Ciryl Gane during Gane's preparations to face Jon Jones in 2023. His story is one of an intrepid fighter who chased multiple dreams across continents before finding a home in combat sports, yet struggled when called upon to test himself against elite heavyweight competition. He remains a cautionary tale of knockout power alone being insufficient at the highest level of the sport.