Freedom 250 wrap-up: Justin Gaethje upsets Topuria to claim undisputed lightweight title
Every fight on the South Lawn ended by knockout. The main event was the biggest upset in modern UFC history, with Gaethje stopping the undefeated Ilia Topuria in the fourth round by corner stoppage.
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 15: Justin Gaethje and Ciryl Gane hold up their belts following a press conference with other fight winners and Dana White following UFC Freedom 250 at the JW Marriott in Washington, DC on June 15, 2026. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Justin Gaethje is the undisputed UFC lightweight champion. That sentence took eight years to write.
In what will go down as one of the largest upsets in modern UFC history, Gaethje stopped Ilia Topuria by fourth-round TKO at UFC Freedom 250 on Sunday night on the South Lawn of the White House, ending the now-former champion’s undefeated run at 17-0 and finally claiming the undisputed title that had eluded him across two prior attempts. The corner stoppage came at the bell ending the fourth, with one of Topuria’s cornermen throwing in the towel as the Spaniard’s face ballooned and a bone visibly displaced on the right side. Topuria had been a 6-to-1 favourite at most major sportsbooks. He had also publicly promised to bury Gaethje, including a pre-fight video that placed a white rose on a casket bearing the challenger’s name.
It was a brutal, back-and-forth fight that ESPN immediately tagged a front-runner for fight of the year.
Gaethje took the first round, landing the bigger shots. Topuria rallied in the second, hurting Gaethje with body shots and chasing a series of submission attempts on the canvas in what looked, for stretches, like a fight slipping toward an early finish. Gaethje, true to a career built on absorbing damage to deliver it, survived. From there the fight tilted. By the end of the third, Topuria was nearly waved off by the doctor. He arguably won the fourth on output. The corner waved it before the fifth.
“My durability, tenacity, and heart will carry me through adversity,” Gaethje said in his post-fight interview.
The 37 year-old, a two-time former interim lightweight champion, had hinted across the build-up that this would be the last fight of his career if he lost. He had also acknowledged, repeatedly, that the undisputed title was the one accomplishment that had eluded him after losses to Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 254 and Charles Oliveira at UFC 274. Sunday was his third shot. He cashed it.
The co-main result reshaped the heavyweight picture in a different direction. Ciryl Gane stopped Alex Pereira at 1:27 of the second round, dropping the Brazilian with a jab early in the frame and then staying on him until referee Herb Dean stepped in. Pereira, attempting to become the first three-division champion in UFC history after recapturing the light heavyweight title from Magomed Ankalaev at UFC 320 last October, was outsized and outpaced from the opening bell. The middleweight-to-heavyweight jump, as Tom Aspinall and Alistair Overeem had predicted in the pre-fight cycle, proved an impossible climb in a single 25-minute window. Gane is now the interim heavyweight champion for the second time in his career, and a unification with Aspinall, assuming Aspinall’s eye recovery and Eddie Hearn’s contract posture both resolve, is the obvious next move.
The rest of the card stayed on theme. Every fight ended by knockout or TKO, a UFC first for a numbered event on a card of this size:
Sean O’Malley returned to form with a second-round knockout of Aiemann Zahabi at the bantamweight limit, dropping Zahabi with punches at 4:02 of round two.
Josh Hokit continued his climb at heavyweight, finishing Derrick Lewis at 4:09 of the second round. The booking had been added to the card after Hokit’s upset of Curtis Blaydes at UFC 327. The win sets up a meaningful next step for the undefeated prospect.
Mauricio Ruffy delivered the visual finish of the night, knocking out Michael Chandler with a spinning wheel kick followed by punches at 4:29 of the first round at lightweight. It was the highlight of the card by some distance and almost certainly a Performance of the Night recipient.
Bo Nickal stopped Kyle Daukaus by first-round TKO at 4:34 of round one, his most credentialed grappling test to date answered cleanly with strikes.
Diego Lopes opened the main card with a second-round TKO of Steve Garcia at featherweight, finishing at 2:42 of round two. Lopes also weighed in a second time on Saturday as the backup fighter for the main event, which makes Sunday’s official total appearances at UFC Freedom 250 closer to one and a third for him than the standard one.
The bonus pool, announced Friday by Dana White and supplemented by World Liberty Financial’s $250,000 contribution, paid out at $425,000 for Performance of the Night and $400,000 per Fight of the Night participant, on top of the new $100,000 base bonus and $25,000 finish bonus rolled out earlier this year with the Paramount broadcast deal. Topuria vs. Gaethje is the obvious Fight of the Night. The Performance of the Night calls between Gane, Ruffy, and Gaethje himself will be the more contested matter at the press conference.
The federal lawsuit seeking to halt the event over the use of the White House South Lawn and Lincoln Memorial cleared its final procedural hurdle Sunday morning when Judge Amit P. Mehta declined to issue an emergency preliminary injunction, allowing the card to proceed as scheduled. The underlying complaint remains pending.
The venue is the story everything else will share oxygen with for the next few news cycles. The South Lawn has hosted state dinners, military reviews, and the Easter Egg Roll. Until Sunday it had never hosted a sanctioned cage fight. President Trump attended in person, the event aligned with his 80th birthday and America’s 250th anniversary, and Crypto.com and Ram served as presenting sponsors.
Tom Aspinall, the undisputed heavyweight champion and the man neither invited to nor scheduled for the event, was reportedly cage-side. His unification fight with Gane now becomes the clearest matchmaking line at heavyweight, assuming his recovery from October’s eye injury clears in time.
For Topuria, 29, the first loss of his career arrives after a year on the sidelines and a fight he had verbally won three times over before he walked out. His next step, including his stated ambition to challenge welterweight champion Islam Makhachev for a third division belt, now has to be re-staged from a different starting position. For Gaethje, the answer is simpler: a defence, and at long last, the belt on his shoulder for the photo.
Promoters tend to copy what works. Sunday worked.