The sequence was as clean as anything he produced in his prime. Twenty seconds in, Cejudo shot a single-leg, lifted Dvalishvili off his feet, and slammed the Georgian to the mat for four points. The points became instantly irrelevant. Cejudo stayed heavy on top, trapped the right arm, and pressed both shoulders to the mat for the pinfall at 36 seconds. Then, in the night’s best moment, the two men broke into a traditional Georgian dance together in the middle of the mat while the Cleveland crowd roared, the rivalry’s edge dissolving into something closer to mutual delight the instant the whistle blew.
Cejudo’s microphone work afterwards, delivered to Chael Sonnen, covered gratitude, honesty, and business in that order.
“Merab is a machine,” Cejudo said. “I’ve been fighting for 13 years on my feet and I took the ‘L’ from him. I knew that he wasn’t necessarily scrambling… obviously I got the pin. Cody Garbrandt, you’re next, b***h.”
Dvalishvili took the defeat with the grace that has made him one of the sport’s most likeable figures, and opened the trilogy door on the spot.
“Absolutely. I love challenges,” Dvalishvili said. “Henry Cejudo called me out, and I said yes. He’s an Olympic champion for a reason. He beat me today. Let’s go for a trilogy in wrestling.”
The ledger between them now reads like a genre unto itself. Dvalishvili outworked Cejudo over three rounds at UFC 298 in February 2024, a cage fight decided by the Georgian’s bottomless pace. At RAF Georgia on July 11, in Cejudo’s signature sport, Dvalishvili authored one of the year’s most remarkable results in any discipline, erasing an 8-0 deficit to win 11-8 and hand the 2008 Olympic champion a defeat that reverberated through the wrestling community. Saturday squared the wrestling series at one apiece and made the overall rivalry 2-1 in Dvalishvili’s favour, across two sports and three meetings, with both men now openly lobbying for a fourth.
For Cejudo, the redemption ran deeper than the scoreline. The Georgia loss stung precisely because conditioning, by his own admission, decided it, the one variable an Olympic champion is never supposed to surrender. Per MMA Fighting, he responded by disappearing for roughly six weeks to Amsterdam, New York, drilling the folkstyle and freestyle fundamentals that thirteen years of MMA had quietly dulled: mat returns, tie-ups, the geometry of a proper shot. The result was a version of Cejudo that gave Dvalishvili no runway to build the pace that has broken everyone else. It also gave the 39-year-old something he had not held in any sport since stopping Dominick Cruz in 2020: a victory. The 0-4 MMA comeback that closed his cage career in December made Saturday’s pin the first raised hand of his second act, and the belt attached to it makes the act official.
The Garbrandt callout has both history and card logic behind it. The former UFC bantamweight champion shares an old orbit with Cejudo from their days near the top of the same division, and Garbrandt competed earlier on Saturday’s card, putting him one wall away when his name got shouted. A Cejudo title defence against another crossover MMA name is exactly the programming RAF’s belt exists to generate.
Neither half of the trilogy conversation is idle in the meantime, and the schedules read like the crossover era in miniature. Dvalishvili challenges UFC bantamweight champion Petr Yan in their own trilogy at UFC 333 on October 24, chasing the belt he lost, and was gracious afterwards about RAF’s value as a live-competition sharpener heading into it, though a 36-second pin is not the clip a title challenger wants circulating during fight week. Cejudo boxes Deen the Great at Misfits Boxing in Miami on September 26, five weeks from Saturday, in his third ruleset of the year. The retirement that was supposed to close his story has instead produced a wrestling title, a boxing debut, and a standing rivalry, which is to say it has produced a fuller calendar than most active careers.
The rest of RAF 12 reinforced how quickly the promotion’s roster has become a crossover institution of its own. Tyron Woodley won his RAF debut, his first competitive victory anywhere since 2018, with a reported test against Khamzat Chimaev looming. Olympic legend Jordan Burroughs and UFC heavyweight Gable Steveson, four weeks from his own cage booking at UFC 331, both won on the card.
For now, the belt is Cejudo’s, the callout is Garbrandt’s to answer, and the trilogy sits exactly where both men placed it on Saturday night: agreed to in spirit, on the record, waiting only for the calendar to clear. On current evidence, neither man’s calendar clears often. Somewhere between Miami, Las Vegas, and whatever mat RAF books next, wrestling’s best new rivalry will find its third date.
