Merab Dvalishvili turned a bad start into a signature finish on Saturday afternoon, rallying from an 8-0 deficit to stun Henry Cejudo in the RAF Georgia main event at Tbilisi Arena in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The comeback gave Dvalishvili another headline result against Cejudo, after he had already beaten him via unanimous decision at UFC 298 on Feb. 17, 2024. This time, though, he had to dig out of a deep hole before the crowd got the ending it came for. The scoreline made the fight feel gone early, and the turnaround made it one of the card’s defining moments.
That reversal matters because the event was built around the rematch, and Dvalishvili’s name was already the one drawing the most attention going in. A fighter can beat an opponent once and still face a very different night the next time, and this one was different enough to force a reset in the middle of the bout.
The missing detail is how the hole disappeared. The result is clear: Dvalishvili was down 8-0, then stormed back to win. What is not laid out in the available record is the exact sequence of scoring that produced the comeback, leaving the final stretch to define the fight more than the intervening moments.
The rest of the card underlined the scale of the night in Georgia. Kyle Snyder defended his RAF light heavyweight title against Abdulrashid Sadulaev, who had beaten Snyder in the 97-kg finals of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Arman Tsarukyan also returned to RAF on the main card and beat Kuat Khamitov via tech fall, 11-0.
Other results piled up quickly: Kyle Dake beat Vladimeri Gamkrelidze, 2-0; Vladimer Khinchegashvili beat Conor Beebe via tech fall, 11-0; Ernazar Akmataliev beat Zain Retherford, 3-3 last point scored; Geno Petriashvili beat Jake Varner via tech fall, 10-0; Helen Maroulis beat Anhelina Lysak via fall; Razambek Zhamalov beat Jarrett Jacques, 3-2; Anastasia Nichita beat Vinesh Phogat, 7-6; and Brock Hardy beat Alibeg Alibegov via tech fall, 13-2.
But the night belonged to Dvalishvili. He entered the rematch having already beaten Cejudo once, then found himself trailing by eight points and still finished with the clearer statement. The unanswered question now is not whether he won, but how often a fight can swing that hard and still end with the same man standing at the center of it.
