Aleksander Emelianenko to Headline Next Month’s M-1 Challenge?

M-1

Might as well pop some Excedrin now, because your head will be aching after this one. According to ADCombat.com, M-1 Global is quietly setting up its first event in Russia, which will go down at St. Petersburg’s 3000-seat Ice Palace on April 3rd. One of the promotional images is above; the event will be headlined by Aleksander Emelianenko (against a yet-unnamed opponent), with M-1/PRIDE/Bodog vets Roman Zentsov and Amar Suloev also scheduled to fight (ditto). According to ADCombat’s anonymous “Russian insider”:

“With the Russian elections last weekend, advertising before [then] was next to impossible, as most attention is focused on the elections. The smaller venue may indicate a good bit of pragmatism on the part of the promoters, since they are only going to have a month or so to really push the event.”

So, by now you’re thinking, “if this is supposed to be an M-1 Global event, why does that ad clearly say M-1 Mix Fight?” Very good question. ADCombat writes:

In a previous conversation, M-1 Global’s Monte Cox confirmed that [Vadim] Finkelstein and [Apy] Echteld would be promoting events with the M-1 Global name, however the infrastructure for the show and promotion are independent of what Cox will use when M-1 Global begins to move forward in the United States.

Which explains absolutely nothing, considering that Finkelchtein isn’t promoting this event with M-1 Global’s name, but under his old Mix Fight label. According to RussianMMA.com, the St. Petersburg event will actually be the second leg of the not-very-well-publicized “M-1 Challenge” that we briefly mentioned last month. The first M-1 Challenge event was apparently held last Sunday in the Netherlands, with the Fedor-coached Russian Red Devil Sports Club competing against France’s Team Amossou, and a Netherlands team taking on a pack of Germans; shockingly, the Russians lost three out of five matches to the Frenchmen. (Don’t ask how the Netherlands/Germany matchups went down, because results weren’t published on M1MixFight.com, and news hasn’t yet trickled down to any other American MMA websites.)

RussianMMA reports that the April 3rd M-1 Challenge event will include teams from Russia, Japan, and “Europe,” and Emelianenko/Zentsov/Suloev will be competing in superfights. Checking M-1 Global’s official site, of course, confirmed nothing — it hasn’t been updated since New Year’s Eve, and you can’t expect Monte Cox to keep tabs on Vadim all the time. Especially when M-1 Global is such a disorganized pit of confusion…

Written by admin on March 6th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on M-1 Mix Fight and Roman Zentzov and Vadim Finkelchtein and Vadim Finkelstein and Amar Suloev and Rumors and News and Aleksander Emelianenko and M-1 and M-1 Global and MMA.

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