“Took Mika like a wet rag”

Freelancer Mika Hämäläinen received the blow of his life in the spring of 2018.

– I remember everything about it – luckily. Not everyone who has faced him may remember.

Hämäläinen talks about Ilia Topuria. About the man who brutally smoked him in Helsinki in one round and won with a guillotine choke.

Since then, Topuria has become a true superstar of the sport. Six years after the meeting with Hämäläinen, the Spanish-Georgian will fight for the UFC title in California Alexander Volkanovsky against.

Hämäläinen’s career, on the other hand, ended that evening.

Who is Ilia?

Topuria arrived in Helsinki for the Cage organization evening from Spain, where he had won the first four matches of his professional career. The bearded promise was only 21 years old.

– We knew that Ilia is a young and up-and-coming fighter whose aim is in the UFC. I was sure that no loose pants would come, Hämäläinen recalls.

However, not everyone was so sure. Iltalehti’s martial arts expert Jaakko Dahlbacka estimated at the time that Topuria’s winning list was “built on steaks”.

Dahlbacka claimed victory in Finland, because Topuria had previously only fought against “taxi drivers”. The athletes knocked down by the Spaniard did not dazzle with their ring experience.

– I thought that, like in professional boxing, someone’s record has been built up a bit. I went straight for this classic trap. I was of the opinion that there is no way Topuri can do well against Hämäläinen, who is actually quite good, says Dahlbacka.

The truth was quickly revealed when Hämäläinen was strangled in a couple of minutes.

– I remember thinking that now it was proven that I was completely wrong. Ilia took Mika like a wet rag in the areas where Mika is really good.

Advantage on the scale

Topuria did not pass the weigh-in before the match. He was one and a half kilos too heavy for the dwarf series, which has a weight limit of 61 kilos.

Hämäläinen did not want to cancel the match, even if he had the right to do so. He had worked hard for the match, and many people had bought a ticket to see him back in the ring after a two-year hiatus.

Hämäläinen didn’t want to disappoint his fans, but at the same time being overweight on the scale gave the opponent an advantage.

– You get a lot of benefits from that. One and a half kilos is a drastic excess in that weight category, Hämäläinen says.

– It would be nice if you could read it in the statistics catch weight. Then people would know that Topuria came to the match overweight.

So you could always ask. Maybe Hämäläinen could have beaten the future UFC star if they had started the match from the same line?

– Impossible to say when he had no chance to get to the weights. He had already pulled the weights brutally when they gave up. The guy’s life would have been in danger if they tried to tear off another kilo and a half from such a stem.

Topuria wised up and has made his UFC career a weight class higher in the featherweight division.

The boss reasons

Even though Hämäläinen got his back pretty bad at the Cage night, the organization’s CEO One Silvera stands strong matchmaker behind the pair of matches he has put together.

– It was in line with how we usually operate. In Cage, the home fighter of the red corner loses relatively more often than in other organizations, because we purposefully make even pairs of matches, Silvera reasons.

Hämäläinen’s list was 8–1 at that stage.

– It was a tough challenge for Mika. And hats off to him. He wanted that challenge.

Silvera and the matchmaker had seen video footage of Topuria’s previous matches. However, according to expert Dahlbacka, it does not necessarily make you blissful.

– He had fought for a couple of minutes in total. If the matches are against the crap, it doesn’t say anything. You can only see when a weak opponent is strangled, says Dahlbacka.

It also quickly became clear that it was not just any strangulation expert. The vertical match also looked very good.

– Right at the beginning of the match, we realized that here is an exceptionally skilled guy who will go far. It was visible in the whole process, Silvera recalls.

Children first

The 34-year-old Hämäläinen currently works as a salesman. His sports career is not officially over yet, although six years have already passed since the last Topuria match. He was 28 then.

Fighting was clearly on the back burner, because Hämäläinen already had two children in 2018, and he didn’t want to put his future solely on the free fight.

– I had made a playful promise to myself that after thirty I wouldn’t hit this head anymore, he laughs.

– For me, Freestyle has always been about young men having fun. If I’m not young, man, or I’m not having fun, that’s when I stop. The word “youth” started to come around.

Hämäläinen’s blood still draws to the freestyle cage, but the family man is aware of the realities and has stuck to other sports.

– I have avoided putting gloves on my hand, because I still have a really strong passion for the freestyle match. I’m afraid that if I put the gloves on my hand, after the first sparring I will already know the date of the match.

Watch the match between Hämäläinen and Topuria from 2018 below.