Fanfare be damned — Manon Fiorot is on the verge of becoming France’s first undisputed UFC champion

The language barrier might be steep, but Manon Fiorot speaks the universal language fluently whenever she steps in the cage to fight. Hailing from Nice, on the French Riviera, she was shipped over to face the 25-year-old Erin Blanchfield in Atlantic City last June, in a fight — let’s just be honest — she was being set up to lose.

The devil was in the details. Blanchfield was a decade younger, undefeated and from New Jersey. Nobody wanted to fight her, especially on the Jersey Shore. She was supposed to punch her own ticket to a flyweight title shot by going right through Fiorot, who had been quietly dominant herself, having taken out Rose Namajunas in her previous fight in Paris.

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We saw what happened. Every now and again we focus so hard on the buzzsaw that we don’t see when it’s headed for a freight train.

“It was one of my best fights, because we were both undefeated in the division together, and she's a very good fighter,” Fiorot told Uncrowned through an interpreter. “So yeah, definitely it's one of my best fights because I won.”

Win she did.

As Fiorot gets ready to take on Valentina Shevchenko for the women’s flyweight title at UFC 315 on Saturday night, the context matters in explaining why she’s the betting favorite. Fiorot very sneakily pulled off one of the best performances of 2024 by handing Blanchfield her first loss. And she didn’t just beat her. She rendered Blanchfield ineffectual. Helpless at times. If nothing else, definitely a work in progress.

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It was like Blanchfield suffered an in-fight existential crisis for not having a plan B, as Fiorot was unbudgeable, unflinching and just as rooted to her own power as the sequoias of Ribeauvillé.

To put it bluntly, she was a brute. She kept the fight standing and punished Blanchfield’s every move.

So while Saturday night’s pay-per-view headliner Belal Muhammad should receive all the credit in the world for going into England and beating Birmingham’s own Leon Edwards at an unholy hour, Fiorot should also get some for doing something similar on a night when only the most diehard of the diehards were even paying attention.

“I think there’s too much time that I don't finish fights in the UFC,” Fiorot said, reprimanding herself for letting the fight reach the scorecards. “But I think Saturday evening, it's a good thing — it’s a good chance to finish up the fight.”

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Shevchenko, for the record, has been finished exactly twice in her long and storied career. Once by Liz Carmouche back when they crossed paths in Concho, New Mexico, some 15 years ago, and then again in her first fight with Alexa Grasso. That loss, of course, set up the three-part series that held the women’s flyweight division in a state of pending for the last couple of years.

In the meantime, the 35-year-old Fiorot has been stacking bodies. Blanchfield was the seventh in a string since Fiorot debuted in 2021 against Victoria Leonardo. She scored one-sided unanimous decisions over Jennifer Maia and Katlyn Chookagian before welcoming Namajunas to the division in front of her countrymen in the fall of 2023.

Of her five decisions, three of them — including the five-rounder against Blanchfield — were clean sweeps on the judges’ scorecards. Only Namajunas and Chookagian can claim to have won a single round against her.

“To be honest, I’m a little surprised to be favorite for this fight, because Valentina’s the champion and she was so dominant,” Fiorot said. “But if you pay attention on the three last fights, I think I am more dominant than her.”

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Fiorot is the reigning queen of the understatement.

Because she’s French, she hasn’t received a ton of fanfare in the States. She doesn’t speak English, but if you watched her on Ariel Helwani’s show last year, you know she understands more than she lets on. Among her extracurriculars, she is a snowboarder, and she says the backcountry terrain and halfpipes beat up her body worse than any of these 125-pound women the UFC puts in front of her. Her trajectory from karate to kickboxing to MMA is made all the more defiant because MMA was illegal in France until 2020.

Five years after the taboo was lifted, it’s as a fighter that she translates best. Should she beat Shevchenko in the co-main event in the epicenter of French-Canada, Montreal — where the “French accent is very funny,” according to Fiorot — she will become the first undisputed French-born champion in UFC history.

Ciryl Gane won the interim heavyweight title against Derrick Lewis in 2021, yet that had the place-holder asterisk. Francis Ngannou represented France when he won the lineal heavyweight title earlier that same year, but he was born in Cameroon. Fiorot is born and raised in France, and she could make that bit of history by dethroning the greatest women’s flyweight the UFC has known, right at a time when France has emerged as a new MMA hotbed.

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“I don't know if I'm a superstar [in France], but yeah, a lot of people recognize me and talk to me,” Fiorot said. “It gives me some power in the streets.”

Winning is the universal language. One more W and any anonymity she’s carried as a contender will be lost by the gold accessory she carries out of Canada.