Cathy Freeman. Shane Warne. Ian Thorpe. Ash Barty. Sam Kerr. Tim Cahill. Kostya Tszyu.
Alexander Volkanovski.
That’s a definitive list of Australia’s greatest international athletes since 1990. The first seven names I listed roll off the tongue in a way that Alexander Volkanovski’s doesn’t, and that is wrong.
You could make an argument that relative to competition, Volk is the single greatest athlete this country has had since 1990. After beating the previously undefeated Movsar Evloev on Sunday morning Australian time, all the discussion is how it’s now inarguable that Volkanovski is the single greatest featherweight in the history of mixed martial arts.
After beating Evloev, Volk has defeated three generations of featherweights. He beat the guys that came before him, in Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes. Then he beat his contemporaries like Max Holloway (three times), Brian Ortega, and The Korean Zombie. Now he’s beaten the next generation with Yair Rodriguez, Diego Lopes twice, and Evloev.
That’s an extraordinary feat. It speaks to both the skill and staying power of a true legend.
That’s the thing about Volk: he’s so specifically great in ways both nuanced and grand.
We saw the specificity of his greatness against Evloev, who was meant to be the best of the new crop. In the fight, Volk showed his extraordinary ability to think through a fight and MacGyver himself a way to win despite being at any number of physical disadvantages.
In the Evloev fight, Volk changed his style slightly. He sat down heavier on his punches and threw leather, maybe partly because he woke up sick and wasn’t as comfortable with his movement. He blunted Evloev’s wrestling at times, once even hitting him with the uno reverse in the second round, before he eventually finished him off with the hellacious punches he was throwing.
On a larger scale, at 38 years old, his level of activity and consistency is uncommon. His last five fights at featherweight have been what I call “check-in fights”, where the UFC is checking in on whether the old guy still has it. Volk has won four out of five, with his only loss coming to Topuria. He’s been like Logan Roy, telling the UFC that the kids are “not serious people”. I can’t think of many other fighters, or athletes for that matter, who have so easily and so often thwarted the generation coming after them.
By the time Volk departs the UFC, he will have beaten every single relevant featherweight. Whoever wins the title after Volk almost certainly have a Volk-induced blemish on their record. The reason for that is that Volk habitually agitates for the toughest fights, including Evloev this most recent time. He wanted Evloev after he beat Lopes the first time because he felt Evloev deserved it even if Lopes was the bigger name. After beating Lopes again, even more widely this time, he got his wish and got to fight the next best featherweight.
That, again, is rare. Especially for a legend held in as much esteem within his sport as Volkanovski. Someone like Canelo Alvarez has avoided the boogeymen in his division as he’s gotten older, keen to protect his legacy. Volk has no such concerns, and he bolsters his own legacy as he mows these villains like he’s Laurie Strode in Halloween Ends.
We do not appreciate him enough in this country. Imagine if Lionel Messi were Australian. That’s the level of comparative greatness that we’re talking about with Volk, and we don’t exactly see murals all over Wollongong like Messi sees in Buenos Aires.
Why?
The biggest element, clearly, is the sport that he does it in. The UFC was a fringey sport in Australia before it became as heavily associated as it now is with the American political right. The UFC’s brand of overt political cheerleading for an unpopular political brand in Australia has, I presume, driven people away from appreciating Volk as a national ornament in the way that the seven I listed at the top have been.
I tend to think that if he was even a boxer, rather than a cricketer or some other more widely popular national sport, he would be closer to the kind of icon he should be. If people would take the time to appreciate him while we have him, they’d see that despite his association with the UFC, Volkanovski is everything great about Australia.
He’s a Greek-Macedonian who is, at once, unapologetically Australian walking out to Men at Work’s classic “Down Under”, but also proud of his immigrant heritage. You can see it both in the way he cooks and the proud Southern European Australian traditions of droppin’ the “g” off every word ending with “ing” and getting your dad to do all the handiwork because you don’t know how to do anything yourself. As a Greek Australian myself, I get it all. He’s also a big personality with a great social media presence, where he displays a real sense of humour and decency.
Alexander Volkanovski is, without question, Australia’s greatest current athlete by virtually any measure you can think of. He’s in the conversation for our greatest athlete since 1990. A guy like him, with his personality, should be Australia’s Manny Pacquiao, without the political or singing careers. He should be an object of overt and unproblematic national pride.
We are doing a disservice to ourselves, and to him, that we don’t treat him that way.
Cathy Freeman. Shane Warne. Ian Thorpe. Ash Barty. Sam Kerr. Tim Cahill. Kostya Tszyu. Alexander Volkanovski.
Put him where he belongs.