Michael Bisping acknowledges how important Vitor Belfort is in UFC history, but he still doesn’t have to like the guy.
Earlier this month, at UFC 315, the promotion announced former light heavyweight champion Vitor Belfort as a member of the 2025 UFC Hall of Fame class, entering the Pioneer Wing. It’s the crowning achievement of a long and storied MMA career, but one that also stung fellow UFC Hall of Famer and frequent UFC commentator Michael Bisping.
Bisping has a long personal history with Belfort. The two fought at UFC on FX 7 back in 2013, with Belfort winning by head-kick knockout. That finish detached the retina in Bisping’s eye, leading to him losing total vision in his right eye. At the time, Belfort was using testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), which Bisping has never forgiven him for, labeling Belfort “the biggest cheat” in combat sports history.
But despite his bad blood with “The Phenom,” Bisping wasn’t too incensed when he learned Belfort was getting inducted into the Hall of Fame.
“When we were in, I think it was Des Moines, Iowa, Paul Felder had a little piece for the package where we speak about the greatness of the people getting inducted into the Hall of Fame,” Bisping told Mike Bohn. “They said, ‘We won’t ask you Mike, for obvious reasons.’ I said, ‘You know what? I don’t care. I’ll do it.’ When you look at it and remove all the emotions from it, the man was the UFC heavyweight champion of the world at 19. He then became the light heavyweight champion. He almost became the middleweight champion. He’s the closest thing we’ve had to a three-weight champion.”
While Belfort was never a UFC heavyweight champion, he did win the heavyweight tournament at UFC 12, knocking out Scott Ferrozzo in just 43 seconds in the finals. He later claimed the UFC light heavyweight title with a win over Randy Couture at UFC 46 when a punch cut Couture’s eyelid, forcing the doctor to stop the bout. Couture then reclaimed the title in their rematch a few months later.
Belfort then bounced around among various promotions before returning to the UFC in 2009, where he challenged for the middleweight title twice, and light heavyweight title once, falling short on all three occasions. During this run, he made use the medical exemption for TRT when that was allowed but was otherwise never implicated in any PED usage. Regardless, even Bisping admits that for as much as he may not care for Belfort, he can’t argue about his contributions to the sport.
“Was he a massive cheater? Of course. Did he take a lot of steroids? Of course,” Bisping said. “Were there a lot of other people doing that at the same time. Absolutely there was. So, I was like, ‘I get it.’ But then, when I thought about it, I thought, ‘I lost an eye because of this guy. He can stick his Hall of Fame up his ass.’
“But he does deserve it. He does deserve it. You can’t deny what he did inside the octagon. You just can’t deny it. Going back all the way to when his UFC debut was, if that’s not a Hall of Fame career, I don’t know what is. Whether you like it or not, he deserves it.”
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