For Hong Kong-born Ramona Pascual, failure is simply an opportunity
“A perfectly timed knee to the solar plexus” is how Ramona Pascual described the move that rounded out her debut year as Hong Kong’s first and only woman to fight in the UFC.
Except the knee in question came from her competitor Tamires Vidal. Having lost her last fight of 2022 in Las Vegas, Pascual used the opportunity to reflect.
“Devastated at how things turned out but I’m far from broken,” she wrote on Instagram. “It takes a lot to live this kind of life and reach limits behind closed doors that most people will never know… I’m here to keep it real and do me. No apologies. Rock bottom we’ve been here before. And I’ll claw my way out every time.”
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Rather than a wave of a white flag, it was a war cry that ignited the Hong Kong fighter’s fans, who showered her with encouragement. It didn’t matter that this was Pascual’s third loss of the year, bringing her future with the UFC into question: her entry to the highest level of her sport last January broke barriers for Hong Kong athletes, and after years of disrupted training due to the pandemic and a crushing injury, it brought her name into the cage at an international level.
Pascual spoke to Tatler in late 2022 from Las Vegas, where she’d been living for nearly a year. After stints training in South Korea and Thailand, she was selected for the UFC China Academy, training at the state-of-the-art Shanghai Performance Institute in 2019, but the facility closed temporarily due to the pandemic and mainland China’s restrictions made travel and training nearly impossible.
Frustrated, she looked Stateside and to the home of the UFC in Las Vegas. It was a tough decision—but it paid off. “There was a bit of self-doubt of like, can I really hang with the best in the world?” she says. “I decided to try it for a couple of months, then within a month and a half, I had this overwhelming sense of clarity and knew this is where I want to be for the rest of my career.”
