Cedric Doumbe was handed his first loss as professional mixed martial artist in front of a sold out Accor Arena in a peculiar ending to the opening PFL Europe card of 2024.
The card featured the opening round of both the 2024 PFL Europe Lightweight and Welterweight tournament and was headlined by the ever popular Doumbe facing the fellow unbeaten Baysangur Chamsoudinov.
The bout opened and Chamsoudinov looked to implement a clear game plan early doors, get the contest to the floor. As a former Glory Kickboxer and with all of his MMA wins coming by way of KO/TKO, opponents will look to take the contest to the floor against such a seasoned striker.
Chamsoudinov had some success with this in the first but ultimately failed to capitalise on having the bout on the mat, with Doumbe constantly working and managing to get the bout back to the feet.
Doumbe signalled to referee Marc Goddard that he was struggling with some sort of complication but the top referee clearly stated 'Don't stop, don't stop.' There were then plenty of feints between the two but with no action. Goddard asked for some action from the pair. Again, Doumbe signalled to his foot and with that, Goddard waved the bout off.
Doumbe immediately protested the decision but as veteran referee John McCarthy via the PFL Instagram page, Doumbe left Goddard with no choice other than to wave the contest off. He said:
"When you see Cedric Doumbe say I have something wrong with my foot, there is nothing that has been done that is illegal so he going to have to fight through the injury, it is what we call self inflicted. And then you see they start to go, and Baki stops like 'hey, you don't want to fight.' And Cedric again looks at Marc Goddard and points to his foot, illustrating he has an injury to his foot. Once that is done, Marc Goddard has got to call the fight, the fight is over. It is a technical knock out for Baki, based upon what we call a self inflicted injury."
In his post fight interview, Doumbe revealed that he had a small slither of glass in his foot which was causing complications. he said:
"First of all, thank you to everyone for watching the fight. So, I did not want to stop the fight, not at all. I wanted to fight, of course, as everybody saw. But I have- I still have because I don't want to remove it, I don't want people to say I am a liar, I have a small (piece of) glass on my foot. I don't know, inside the cage, it is hurting me, I just want to remove it and keep going.
"The referee told me 'you can't stop' so, okay. I wanted to fight and then my opponent, he is looking at me, he is seeing that something is annoying me. He says 'just remove it' and then we both stopped together, looking at the referee and then he stopped the fight."
