Song Yadong closed out UFC Macau with a second-round submission win over Deiveson Figueiredo, stopping the former flyweight champion with a guillotine choke just before the round was over. In a main event that started cautiously, Yadong finished the night with the kind of result that made the crowd at Galaxy Arena leave on its feet.
The win mattered because it came at the end of a card that had already produced quick finishes and a few difficult moments for Chinese fighters. Alonzo Menifield stopped Zhang Mingyang in the final minute of the first round, Sergei Pavlovich needed less than a minute to beat Tallison Teixeira and Kai Asakura knocked out Cameron Smotherman in the first round, setting a fast, punishing tone before Yadong stepped in.
For one round, the main event barely tilted. Yadong and Figueiredo spent much of the opening frame feeling each other out, though both landed shots and kept the pace measured. The fight changed in the second round when Yadong clipped Figueiredo with a calf kick sequence and then locked in the guillotine, forcing the tap in the second round and ending the card with the home crowd's loudest moment of the night.
That finish also gave Chinese fans a final lift after a night when athletes from the country had struggled to keep momentum inside the cage. Yadong did not just win; he pulled the event back toward the home side, and he did it against a name opponent in a fight that carried real weight on a major UFC card in Macau.
The performance also did more than settle the main event. It further cemented Yadong's standing as one of the UFC's elite bantamweights, especially after a run that had included a near-level fight with Sean O'Malley earlier in the year. What comes next for him is still unclear, but after this kind of finish in front of his own crowd, he is likely to stay in the title conversation for the division's next round of big fights.
