Muay Thai: no pulling back punches on Abu Dhabi’s debut Fight Night

None of the combat sports can prepare you for the brutality of Muay Thai, which has a kind of freedom of violence to it that many other martial arts or combat sports purposely restrain.

Mohamed Isaef, left, from Dagestan and Voughn Don Ayre from Philippines slug it out at the Hard Knox Fight Night yesterday at Du Forum in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi. Ravindranath K / The National

Abu Dhabi is familiar with combat sports. The most civil of all, jiu-jitsu, is almost a national sport. It has seen its share of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events and there is a second UFC event next month. Over the winter there was even the first professional boxing night held in the capital.

If you can somehow bring yourself to call it combat, and sport, then even the WWE events count.

But none of it can prepare you for the brutality of Muay Thai, which has a kind of freedom of violence to it that many other martial arts or combat sports purposely restrain. The ring announcer said it at the end of the first fight on the first Muay Thai fight night in Abu Dhabi, at Yas Island last night – and he could not be accused of hyping this up.

Milena Martinou, the co-main eventer, said this week that what made Muay Thai more brutal than, say, straightforward kick-boxing was the use of elbows and knees.

That does not sound so dangerous when you think about it: elbows and knees tend by nature to be instruments more of clumsiness than viciousness.

Seeing it in action, though, makes it clear what she means. It became apparent in the night’s first fight, about two minutes into the second of five rounds between Atan Canlubo from the Philippines and Liam Purcel, an Abu Dhabi-based Irishman.

Purcel had dominated the fight until then but at that moment, he gathered Canlubo into a clinch and unleashed an unending sequence of knees into his body. It soon forced Canlubo into accepting the bout was over, a technical knockout the official verdict. Brutal.

Disconcertingly the art of eight limbs, as Muay Thai is also known, also rewards non-brutal trip-ups, the kind you might carry out on a friend walking down a street in jest (‘Had a nice trip’ and so on).

But there is overall a sense that this is unchained and lacking in whatever thin etiquette combat sports maintain.

Muay Thai was merely one of four different ways to inflict pain on an opponent on display at the fight night.

Of the eight fights, organised and promoted by Cobra Fitness Gym, three were Muay Thai, two boxing bouts, two MMA fights and one K-1 bout. That last is a combination of karate, kung-fu and kick boxing.

The Muay Thai fights were sanctioned by the World Muay Thai Council (WMC), the first time that has happened in the UAE.

If it was difficult to keep up with the different fight styles – some with submissions, some with kicks allowed, some with boxing gloves, some without – the energetic thousand-plus crow did not seem concerned.

In at least three different kinds of bouts one could only demand that an arm be broken.

There was also a sense of things teetering on the edge of chaos at times during the evening, such as when one of the trainers faced off to a referee over a decision, or when the popular boxer Mohammad Ali Bayat remonstrated with the referee after he stopped his fight with Fatih Ulusoy in the first round.

Judging by the turnout and the enthusiasm, though, the fight game is here to stay.

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