Ten fighters won a second UFC belt. Seven defended it
Islam Makhachev defends the welterweight title at UFC 330. Across 482 UFC title fights, two-division champions have a strange record with the second belt.
On November 15, 2025, Islam Makhachev took a unanimous decision off Jack Della Maddalena and became the tenth fighter since 2000 to win a UFC title in a second weight class. On Saturday in Philadelphia he tries to do the part almost nobody gets around to. He defends it.
I should be upfront about my bias, because it shapes everything below. I think the two-division champion has become the promotion's favorite piece of merchandise and its least examined one. We are told it is the summit of the sport. What the record shows is that it usually freezes a division's competitive calendar for a year or more, and that the belt collected on the way up tends to end up on a shelf.
So I pulled every UFC title fight in our database, all 482 of them going back to November 12, 1993, and looked at what actually happened after somebody won a belt in a second weight class.
Photo: Oisinvg / CC BY-SA 4.0
Ten champions, seven defenses
Here is the full modern list. A second belt means the fighter had already won a UFC title in another division before this one.
| Fighter | Second belt | Won it | First defense | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Randy Couture | Light heavyweight | Sep 26, 2003 (UFC 44, dec. over Tito Ortiz) | Jan 31, 2004 vs Vitor Belfort | Lost, doctor's stoppage |
| BJ Penn | Lightweight | Jan 19, 2008 (UFC 80, sub. over Joe Stevenson) | May 24, 2008 vs Sean Sherk | Won, TKO |
| Conor McGregor | Lightweight | Nov 13, 2016 (UFC 205, KO over Eddie Alvarez) | none | none |
| Georges St-Pierre | Middleweight | Nov 5, 2017 (UFC 217, sub. over Michael Bisping) | none | none |
| Daniel Cormier | Heavyweight | Jul 8, 2018 (UFC 226, KO over Stipe Miocic) | Nov 3, 2018 vs Derrick Lewis | Won, submission |
| Amanda Nunes | Women's featherweight | Dec 30, 2018 (UFC 232, KO over Cristiane Justino) | Jun 6, 2020 vs Felicia Spencer | Won, decision |
| Henry Cejudo | Bantamweight | Jun 9, 2019 (UFC 238, KO over Marlon Moraes) | May 9, 2020 vs Dominick Cruz | Won, KO |
| Jon Jones | Heavyweight | Mar 4, 2023 (UFC 285, sub. over Ciryl Gane) | Nov 16, 2024 vs Stipe Miocic | Won, KO |
| Alex Pereira | Light heavyweight | Nov 11, 2023 (UFC 295, KO over Jiri Prochazka) | Apr 13, 2024 vs Jamahal Hill | Won, KO |
| Ilia Topuria | Lightweight | Jun 28, 2025 (UFC 317, KO over Charles Oliveira) | none | lost the belt on return |
Seven of the ten made a first defense. They went 6-1 in it, and the one loss is 22 years old: Randy Couture cut open by Vitor Belfort at UFC 46, four months after taking the belt off Tito Ortiz.
That is the good news for Makhachev, and it is real. Once these fighters actually walk out to defend the second belt, they win. Alex Pereira knocked out Jamahal Hill at UFC 300. Daniel Cormier submitted Derrick Lewis. Henry Cejudo knocked out Dominick Cruz. Jon Jones knocked out Stipe Miocic at 37 years old.
The bad news is the other three names, and what they have in common.
The failure mode is the calendar, not the challenger
Conor McGregor won the lightweight title in November 2016 and never defended it. Georges St-Pierre won the middleweight title in November 2017 and never defended it. Neither man lost the belt in a cage.
Ilia Topuria is the fresh case, and it is the one that should bother anybody who thinks the second belt is a trophy you get to keep. He knocked out Charles Oliveira at UFC 317 on June 28, 2025 to take the lightweight title, then did not fight again for almost a full year. On January 24, 2026, with the champion inactive, Justin Gaethje beat Paddy Pimblett for an interim lightweight belt at UFC 324. When Topuria finally came back on June 15, Gaethje knocked him out in the fourth round. Our rankings board lists Gaethje as lightweight champion from the following morning.
Read the last 19 months of the lightweight division in order. Makhachev defends in January 2025, then leaves for welterweight. Topuria wins the vacant belt in June 2025 and does not defend it. An interim champion is created in January 2026. The interim champion knocks out the real one in June 2026. That division spent a year and a half being administered rather than contested.
I do not think this is anybody's villainy. It is what happens when the promotion's most sellable asset is a man holding two belts and the scheduling incentive is to keep him rare. It is worth noticing, though, that the cost lands entirely on the divisions and on the contenders who spend those months fighting for placeholder titles while the actual champion is somewhere else.
Against that group of eight who came back at all, Makhachev's nine-month turnaround sits right in the middle:
- Cormier: 3.9 months
- Penn: 4.1 months
- Couture: 4.2 months
- Pereira: 5.1 months
- Makhachev: 9.0 months
- Cejudo: 11.0 months
- Topuria: 11.6 months, and he lost
- Nunes: 17.2 months
- Jones: 20.4 months
There is no clean relationship between the layoff and the result, and I am not going to invent one. Amanda Nunes came back after 17 months and won a decision. Jones came back after 20 months and won by knockout. Couture came back in four months and got stopped on cuts. The gap does not predict the fight. What it reliably predicts is the state of the division left behind, and Makhachev has left one behind: he last defended the lightweight title on January 18, 2025, submitting Renato Moicano in the first round, and Gaethje holds that belt today.
What Saturday actually asks of him
Makhachev arrives in Philadelphia at 28-1. The loss is a knockout by Adriano Martins at UFC 192 in October 2015. Nobody has beaten him in the ten years and ten months since.
Ian Machado Garry is 17-1, and that one defeat is a five-round decision against Shavkat Rakhmonov at UFC 310 in December 2024. Since then he has beaten Carlos Prates over five rounds and taken a unanimous decision off former champion Belal Muhammad in November, which is a stronger recent run than most challengers carry into a title fight. The market has him at a consensus +275 to Makhachev's -345, which prices the champion as a heavy favorite without pricing the fight as a formality.
The part I keep returning to is size. Makhachev spent his career at lightweight, moved up once, and beat a natural welterweight by out-pointing him across 25 minutes rather than drowning him. Garry is tall, long, and has spent his entire UFC run at 170 pounds, and his only loss came to the division's best finisher. Nobody is being fed anybody here.
There is a version of Saturday where Makhachev wins, becomes the first fighter since Jon Jones to defend a second-division belt, and the night writes itself as a coronation. There is another where he loses, and two divisions will have spent a year in a holding pattern for nothing.
Either way, the number that stays with me out of those 482 title fights is not 6-1. It is three, the count of two-division champions this century who won a second belt and never got a successful defense out of it. One of them was knocked out the first time he came back to try. Winning two belts is the part the sport throws a parade for. Keeping one has always been the harder trick, and lately it has not even looked like the goal.