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Brett Okamoto
Tom Aspinall‘s father and head coach, Andy Aspinall, said he has yet to see an opponent truly test his son in mixed martial arts — and he is beginning to think he never will.
On the surface, that might sound like an arrogant — or at least very biased — thing to say, but the results support it. Aspinall (15-3) faces Ciryl Gane (13-2) at UFC 321 on Saturday in Abu Dhabi (2 p.m. ET on ESPN PPV, prelims at 10 a.m.), in his first defense of the UFC’s undisputed heavyweight title. If Gane, who is a 3-to-1 betting underdog, can simply make it to the second round, he’ll be the first to survive an opening round against Aspinall in 4½ years. The 32-year-old’s past three wins have come by knockout in 60, 69 and 73 seconds. His average fight time is the shortest in UFC history at 122 seconds. In other words, Aspinall is disposing of heavyweights in a manner the sport has literally never seen.
“I want to see him tested, and he wants to be tested,” Andy told ESPN. “But lately, I’ve had this thing where I don’t even get nervous for the fight. The thing that actually does worry me is that over the next three or four years, Tom will have fought for a total of three minutes.”
Aspinall had hoped to finally have the opportunity to overcome adversity and take the undisputed belt from former champion Jon Jones in competition in 2025, but Jones announced his retirement instead. Jones has since stated he intends to fight again but has continued to refrain from mentioning Aspinall as a possible opponent.
In the absence of that Jones fight, Aspinall’s most obvious path to building a legacy appears to be what it’s been so far — historical dominance. It’s not exactly the legacy he and his team want, but Andy said, he doesn’t foresee any change to the narrative this weekend or anywhere on the immediate horizon.
The biggest question about Aspinall’s forthcoming title reign: Will it ever look competitive?
“Ciryl’s quite fast, but we’ll find out how fast he really is when he fights Tom,” Andy said. “I don’t know. Of course, people want to ask if [Tom] can go 25 minutes, and I say, ‘Of course he can in the gym.’ He could probably do 40 minutes in the gym against eight different partners, but that’s in bigger gloves and it’s just a different feeling. He’s got that drive where he wants to be tested, and the threat of a big punch is always there, but I don’t know if there’s a guy in the world who has the skill level to truly test him. I really don’t know.”
What is behind this gap between Aspinall and the rest of the division? More than one might expect.
Of course, he is a naturally gifted heavyweight, but his game is “sprinkled with magic,” as his training partner and fellow UFC heavyweight Ante Delija says. Working in tandem with his detail-oriented father, Aspinall has developed a four-pronged style that has become uniquely devastating to the heavyweight division.
Mentality
Khamzat Chimaev won the middleweight championship in August by defeating Dricus Du Plessis by unanimous decision. In the five-round fight, he landed 529 total strikes and accumulated more than 21 minutes of control, per UFC Stats. Merab Dvalishvili has defended his men’s bantamweight belt three times already this year, recording 32 takedowns in the process. Those figures, while impressive to Andy, do not reflect the approach he has instilled into his son. If Tom’s performances started to resemble anything like what those two have done, Andy said, he’d view it as a problem to correct.
“You can see how good those guys are, but I’d be really upset if Tom threw 500 strikes and didn’t finish a guy,” Andy said. “If Tom hit someone with 20 punches and didn’t hurt him, I’d think something was very wrong. If Merab takes you down 17 times, that means you kept getting up. His takedowns are good, but his ability to keep guys down and finish them is not. My philosophy, going all the way back to when Tom and I started, is to not get hit, first and foremost, and get the referee to stop it.”
Retired UFC veteran Dan Hardy, now an MMA analyst, pointed to Aspinall’s 2022 win over Alexander Volkov as an example of a time when Aspinall realized he didn’t have the position he wanted and made the right adjustments to take back control of the fight. Midway through the first round, Aspinall suddenly backed out of an armlock attempt and stood up as he and Volkov were against the fence, only to take Volkov down again moments later and finish him with a different armlock in the center of the Octagon. To Hardy, it was somewhat unusual to see a fighter willingly give up that kind of position, even if he had determined the submission was out of reach.
“He literally just let go of a kimura and let Volkov get back to his feet,” Hardy said. “Then he took him down away from the fence, where the armlock would be easier to get. The confidence it takes to let go of that submission and give away position, you don’t see that. Where they were against the fence, mechanically Tom just wasn’t going to be able to get the submission. So, his response was, ‘I’m not even going to try, and I’m not going to just hold him here.’ That shows he’s just in a different league.
“I think a lot of that comes from the father-son relationship. Of course, Andy is wanting to keep his son safe, which means wanting him to get wins effectively and efficiently. At heavyweight, Tom’s never going to fight someone who can’t knock him out. There’s a margin of error that presents itself, so if I’m Andy, I’m thinking the same thing for my son: ‘Get these motherf—ers out of there.'”
Technique
Less than one minute into his most recent fight against Curtis Blaydes in July 2024, Aspinall ate a jab, then dodged a short right cross in the middle of the Octagon. Exactly five seconds later, he countered Blaydes’ jab with a right hand of his own that knocked Blaydes out. It’s an Aspinall moment that specifically stands out to retired bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, who now also serves as an MMA analyst.
“Once he felt that timing and the range of Blaydes’ jab, he was ready to counter over the top on rhythm,” said Cruz, who was renowned for his footwork and distance control. “Some of these intangibles people want to talk about when it comes to Tom, I can’t stress enough that I think all fighters at the top have them. Every fighter at the championship level has ‘killer instinct. … These aren’t gifts; these are qualifications at the top. What separates Tom Aspinall is his rhythm and his timing.
“The momentum that he creates by being on his toes, flipping his jab, fighting loose with his hands down — it makes him twice as fast as everybody he fights. He has a style that you never see at heavyweight, and I think he’s going to change the division. More guys are going to have to start adding that to their game.”
Aspinall’s style has been a work in progress for more than 20 years. It started with jiu-jitsu when he was a child and progressed into wrestling, boxing and kickboxing. He and Andy used to drill distance control in their family garden in Safford, England, in a kind of cat-and-mouse game between them, Aspinall mirroring the movements of his father. Andy would lob tennis balls at his son until he could accurately jab 20 in a row. As his career progressed, Aspinall sought out crossover opportunities that included sparring sessions with multiple-time heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury as well as multiple-time kickboxing champion Rico Verhoeven.
The level of attention dedicated to each craft has honed Aspinall’s style into one that could “take out three different opponents on the same night, in three different ways,” Hardy said. It’s actually easy to forget that Aspinall’s base skill for MMA was grappling. He has 11 knockouts to go with four submissions in MMA and is interested in professional boxing eventually.
“He was always really confident in his grappling,” Andy said, “because he was so in front of the game in that aspect. But then he got really confident in his striking when people started falling over when he hit them.”
“When he first got into the UFC, they said he was good and I told them, ‘No, he’s better than good.’ And they asked me, ‘How do you know already?’ And I said, ‘Because I’ve just seen him train with the best boxer in the world for 18 months, spar 15 rounds with the best kickboxer in the world and had the British wrestling team into the gym.’ Tom is better than nearly all of them at their own sport. You put that all together, he’s better than good in MMA.”
Preparation
Prior to coaching his son, Andy enjoyed a successful career as a systems analyst and computer programmer. Essentially, a business would hire him to break down its operations, modernize its computer programs and clean up all of the finer details. Andy has applied that exact approach directly to combat sports.
“I’ve watched film every day since the mid-’90s,” Andy said. “I’m mad on watching videos, because this game is all logic to me. We’ve broken down videos of specific strikes, analyzing where Tom’s head position is and how fast he’s able to back up. He can actually back up faster with his hands down than up, but he’s still safe as long as he has his head in this position. And I probably sound like I’m trying to come across as this ‘big head trainer’ and I’m not. I’ve just always been the guy to analyze the s— out of things.”
Seconds before the UFC’s commentators watched Aspinall submit Volkov in 2022, they all raved about his ability to slip Volkov’s right hand and seamlessly shoot into a takedown. That moment is one of the most telling in Aspinall’s entire career, Cruz said, not because of how smart or athletic it made Aspinall look, but because of how well-prepared it showed he was. That sequence showed Cruz hours upon hours of pad work, which ultimately fostered immediate responses to the action that was in front of him.
“Tom threw a high kick earlier, knowing that Volkov would start to answer with his right hand,” Cruz said. “When you do pad work, you get a feel for things like that. I’m sure he pulled that right hand out of Volkov, knowing he wanted to slide right under it.”
Given his tendency to analyze every detail, Andy directs a great deal of his team’s focus toward Tom’s weaknesses — perhaps even more so than amplifying his strengths. For instance, it’s not surprising Aspinall dedicates a lot of time to sparring ahead of a fight, as that’s where a lot of his timing and rhythm is derived from. What’s potentially surprising is that Andy will designate nearly half of those sparring rounds to working only techniques his fighters aren’t comfortable with and, frankly, rarely use in competition.
“[KSW heavyweight champion] Phil De Fries comes in and hates it, because he wants to do five rounds of MMA sparring,” Andy said. “Instead, I’ll make him do eight rounds — and in three of them, all he’s allowed to do is stand against the fence and block punches. Five minutes, just standing there and getting punched, doing all you can to block them or clinch. We’ll do a round where you can only throw the jab, followed by a round you can only throw spinning kicks. I want them to work on the things they’re not good at.”
As Aspinall’s profile and resources have increased, so has his ability to draw training partners. His team has become a European hub for heavyweight talent, which has benefitted Aspinall greatly. He often lacked bigger sparring partners in the earlier stage of his career.
“People are gravitating there not only because of the training but because of the bigger bodies there they can’t find anywhere else,” Hardy said. “The culture they’ve created there has turned quite special.”
Speed
In a 2½-minute win over Serghei Spivac in 2021, Aspinall was credited for throwing only 22 strikes and landing 12 — but those numbers don’t even tell a fraction of the story.
Within those 150 seconds, Aspinall probably threw out at least 100 feints — deceptive, fake punches — which he didn’t intend to land, using them only to read and disturb any rhythm Spivac hoped to set up. Using feints at that kind of pace is rare at heavyweight, perhaps because the majority of the division lacks the fast-twitch reflexes needed to do it effectively.
“Spivac was biting on every feint,” Cruz said. “You can see how he’s biting on all of them. Aspinall starts to win that fight without even punching him, that’s how good he is. These other guys do not feint. You get over a minute in and Aspinall has still only thrown four punches, but his feints force Spivac to shoot [a takedown attempt] and then Aspinall counters perfectly because he could see it coming a mile away. They forced Spivac to be so uncomfortable, he forced himself into a grappling position and got caught.”
Spivac is hardly the first or last opponent to look uncomfortable with Aspinall’s speed. It’s a natural gift that anyone can see, and his team has worked to take advantage of it as much as possible.
The topic of Aspinall’s speed and how he maximizes its effect in his game reminds Andy of a line from MMA pioneer Rickson Gracie‘s 1999 documentary on vale tudo, “Choke,” that claims there are “loads of big guys” in combat sports but very few “good big guys.”
“When Tom starts moving around with that footwork and speed, there’s almost this speed shock that happens, like his opponent has never seen anything like it before,” Hardy said. “And he’s so technically well-rounded to take advantage of it. One thing that stands out about Tom is that he’ll throw a knee-elbow combination from the same side, one after another. That same-side dual attack is very hard for heavyweights to deal with for some reason, I believe because most of them don’t have the speed to do it so it catches them by surprise.”
It all combines into something of a perfect storm in the heavyweight division. It’s why there was so much demand for a fight between Aspinall and Jones — a potentially perfect heavyweight facing arguably the most perfect fighter of all time. It’s also possibly why the fight between those two never happened. Jones was always considered one of the smartest fighters in MMA. Perhaps he looked at Aspinall’s qualities and didn’t like his chances. And it’s why, when Andy Aspinall wonders if his son will ever face real adversity in the UFC, no one can say for certain right now that he will.
