'I KO all the girls': The humanity and hubris of Cyborg Justino

A previous version of this story ran before UFC 214. This story appears in the Aug. 21 edition of ESPN The Magazine. Subscribe today!

Cristiane Cyborg Justino sits in a bath and prays.

She closes her eyes. The water is 105 degrees, and she's already dehydrated, the room a hellish trap of heat and humidity. There's no escape, not even a mental one. Her coach used to tell her to take her mind somewhere, anywhere, when she's cutting weight -- Go to the beach, Cris. Feel the ocean crash over your head, Cris. But when she tries to mentally leave this hotel bathroom in Brasília, she sees only Yang Jian Bing.

Yang was a mixed martial arts fighter too. He too pushed his body to the depths of severe dehydration and then, eventually, suffered suspected heatstroke and cardiopulmonary failure.

Yang passed away in December 2015. He died cutting weight, Justino thinks. People talked about him for one week.

Now, nine months later, as Justino sinks farther into a tub, she knows people have already forgotten his name. So is it worth it? This wringing her body of every last ounce of water? This almost-death? Simply to make weight for a fight?

Justino is the most fearsome women's MMA fighter on the planet -- she chose the moniker "Cyborg," a being whose abilities far exceed those of normal humans. But today, as she prepares to make the 140-pound catchweight for her Sept. 24, 2016, fight against Lina Lansberg, she's afraid that stepping into the Octagon is not worth this. That nothing is worth this.

Justino's body is a sculpted 5-foot-8, 170-pound weapon. It is her greatest asset. It is also her most formidable obstacle.

Her strength borders on savagery in the cage, where she shells opponents with five-minute flurries of strikes. Ask Tonya Evinger, Justino's most recent victim, who resisted admirably for more than two rounds but eventually fell to earth. Five of Justino's past eight fights have ended in the first round, three in under a minute and a half. And with 18 victories (16 by KO or TKO) and one no-contest, she hasn't lost since her professional debut in 2005.

"Not a lot of girls can KO fighters," she says with a shrug. "I KO all the girls."

But after struggling for years simply to line up willing opponents, the 12-year veteran has only now found a stage to match the talent that her team insists is unrivaled. In July, at UFC 214 in Anaheim, California, Justino competed for -- and won -- her first Ultimate Fighting Championship belt. She is 32 years old.

"Cris is the baddest girl on the planet," says her boxing coach, Jason Parillo. "And no one knows who she is."

From 2013 until early last year, Justino fought exclusively in the 145-pound featherweight division of the all-female promotion Invicta FC -- rather than the splashier, higher-profile UFC -- because she had no home elsewhere. Even after the UFC added women to its cards in 2013, it started small, featuring only 135-pound bantamweight. Strawweight, at 115 pounds, would follow the next year, but as recently as last October, UFC president Dana White insisted "there aren't enough good women at 145 pounds to create an entire division."

Justino has long viewed White's unwillingness to develop her featherweight division as a personal affront. "They never respected me," she says. Justino and those in her orbit -- Parillo and coach Tito Ortiz, a Hall of Fame fighter -- contend that White's justification was a red herring to deflect from the real reason the UFC balked at adding 145-pound fighters.

"Ronda Rousey was the holdup," Parillo says. "One hundred percent. Ronda Rousey."

In their view, the UFC was simply more devoted to its biggest star than to investing in the sport's best fighter; it didn't need a featherweight division -- or Cyborg -- since it already had the sport's megastar. "Cris would have smoked Rousey," Ortiz says. "It would have been done in one round."

White, for his part, has continued to publicly own his role in Justino's contentious history with the UFC. "I don't know how it happened," he says now. "But it did. And I needed to fix it."

While Justino says she forgives White, in many ways she still carries that old slight, her defiance seeking constant release. Her demeanor demands recognition. She sports a shock of Jessica Rabbit, electric-red hair. When she peels off her sweatshirt to train with Parillo, a black tee reveals her likeness: a chiseled, glowing goddess, right leg up, arms poised for combat. "FIGHTER. FEARLESS. FEMALE," it declares.

She is both combative and hypersensitive to criticism. Justino has routinely questioned the UFC's commitment to promoting her: "My team went back through the @UFC twitter feed history. Any guesses how many tweets they tagged me in ... ?" she posted in June. But she has also given the organization reason to not want to raise her profile. She tested positive for steroids five and a half years ago, a black eye that has yet to entirely fade. She punched a fellow fighter, Angela Magana, at a UFC retreat in May, frustrated over Magana's repeated cyber insults. The incident earned Justino a citation for misdemeanor battery. (She pleaded not guilty, and the Las Vegas City Attorney's Office will decide in August whether it will file a complaint.)

Ultimately, her humanity lies in her hubris. The outsized sense of pride that has undeniably led to trouble also led to her greatest triumph, a dozen years into her career: a UFC title.

Tito Ortiz first met Justino nine years ago in his wooded compound in Big Bear, California. He'd converted a log cabin, Oscar De La Hoya's old home, into a training lair, bringing in sparring partners to help him prepare for bouts. In 2008, Evangelista "Cyborg" Santos arrived with his then-wife, Cris -- she later adopted her ex-husband's fighting nickname -- to help Ortiz prep for his UFC match against Lyoto Machida. Ortiz's four-car garage housed a cage, and husband and wife stepped in and began to spar.

"They're punching, kicking," Ortiz says. "He head-kicked her and kind of dazed her a bit. She took a second, then went at it again. I was ..." he pauses, "dumbfounded."

Justino's quest to prove her mettle was all-consuming. In 2014, she vowed that she would make 135 pounds in order to fight in the UFC; she would meet Ronda Rousey at bantamweight. Justino set out on a yearslong pursuit to remake herself. She ran 12 miles a day, doubling down on cardio to lose muscle mass. She became anemic, she says, because of what amounted to a three-year diet designed to hit her mark. She fell short, a failure that dismayed MMA enthusiasts pining for a Rousey-Cyborg megafight. It ate at her too. She could not reconcile why she was the best fighter in the world without the right platform. Ultimately, she chose not to resist the UFC's siren song, signing on to two fights in 2016 on UFC cards. She'd fight not for a belt but at 140 pounds, first against Leslie Smith and later against Swedish fighter Lina Lansberg.

Which is how Justino found herself contemplating her mortality in a bathtub in Brazil.

She made her weight last September for the right to face off against, and eventually beat, Lansberg, then vowed never to put her body through that kind of weight cut again. On every final day before weigh-in, there's the Sweet Sweat she rubs onto her skin, a layer of grease to ratchet up circulation and perspiration. Over that, she wears a sauna suit -- plastic -- to trap heat. Over that, sweats and a hoodie. Then socks, gloves, a winter beanie. Then the treadmill or soccer or light work with hand pads -- anything to send those sweat glands into overdrive. As the scale looms, there's the sauna and then that bath, filled with Epsom salts because that allegedly draws fluid out of the body, and fluid is the enemy.

"You dream you drank water," Ortiz says. "And you wake up in a panic, going, 'Oh my god, I drank water. Did I drink water?'"

Justino flew down to Brazil from her home in Huntington Beach, California, the week before the fight. In an Outside the Lines piece on Justino's weight cutting last year, she said she was 26 pounds over the 140-pound catchweight. And though drained from the cut, she unleashed an onslaught against Lansberg, landing 84 significant strikes to Lansberg's 14. Justino wound up in the hospital before and after the pummeling. In the days leading up to the fight, she arrived with an elevated heart rate; two days after it, she'd return with post-weight-cut dehydration so severe that doctors were unable to draw her blood.

Cutting weight is not Justino's cross to bear alone. It's practically sacred in MMA, a vestige of its wrestling heritage, as much rite of passage as act of masochism, given its risks, which include heatstroke and potential brain injury; organ failure; death. Rousey once spent five hours in a sauna, dropping 17 pounds in 24 hours, just to prove she could. Fighters use diuretics to increase urination. They take emetics to force vomiting. They resort to drugs that cause diarrhea. They sweat through saunas and hot baths. They spit in cups. Anything to expel fluid. "I've done 34 pounds in two days," Ortiz says. "I thought I was going to die."

"This is the biggest issue facing the sport," says Andy Foster, executive officer of the California State Athletic Commission, MMA's regulating body in the state that hosts more fights than any other. He studied 136 MMA athletes in bouts since late 2015 and discovered that after weigh-in, 31 percent regained more than 10 percent of their body weight in 24 hours -- clear evidence, he says, that nearly 1 in 3 fighters achieved weight cut through some degree of dehydration. In response, the commission recently approved aggressive weight-cutting reforms. In California, fighters now must be licensed by weight class and obtain medical signoff to fight in their desired division. Fighters who miss weight more than once could be reassigned classes; fighters who fail to make weight will face financial penalty.

The UFC too has worked to tackle weight cutting. As of UFC 200 last July, all fighters must check in for fight week within 8 percent of their target weight. Missing that mark means daily weight monitoring in the bout's lead-up and weight management counseling before their next fight.

"My biggest fight over the past few years hasn't been in the ring or cage," Justino wrote in a letter this past May lauding Foster's efforts, "but inside the bath, sauna and on the treadmill."