Jacinta Austin has claimed that winning the OKTAGON MMA title at OKTAGON 46 will be an emotional moment for both her and her team.
Austin travels to Germany on September 16 to battle for the vacant strawweight title. Opposite her will be Katharina Dalisda, looking to win gold in her hometown – Frankfurt.
‘The Juggernaut’ won her lone OKTAGON MMA bout earlier this year, submitting Sofia Bagishvili in the first round to secure a title shot. She has one loss in her career, coming against Dana White’s Contender Series’ Josefine Knutsson in August 2022.
Austin then took up an offer from Knutsson to go and train with her in Stockholm at Allstars Training Center, home of UFC middleweight contender Khamzat Chimaev and Alexander Gustafsson.
The 28-year-old spoke about the title opportunity and what it would mean to her and her team.
She said: “It means everything, this is kinda like my big moment. I feel like this is what eight years has accumulated to, this one big moment you think you’re gonna get. This is kinda, I feel like, the final chapter of this path before I go onto the next path.
“We’re going to someone else’s hometown to fight someone for their own title as well. I’m from such a small place in Sydney, such a small gym with almost no reputation before now. So, giving my gym a world title that we went to someone else’s home ground to win, there’s no advantages here!
“Besides the skills and coaches I have, there’s no home crowd advantage, there’s no hometown advantage, there’s no advantage. So to win it and bring it back home to my small, little gym in Hornsby, it means everything to me at the moment. It’s going to be a very emotional night when we win it.”
Austin Describes Mental Toll of Competing and Training in MMA
Mixed martial arts is a very physical sport, which can lead to the psychological side of the sport going under the radar. Fighters often live a very busy life, training multiple times a day, placing themselves on strict diets, and completing various media obligations as well as trying to live a normal family life.
Austin discussed this in detail, mentioning that while it obviously takes a toll on herself – it can also have a detrimental effect on relationships with friends, family, and her fiancé. The Australian also claimed that it is the fight camps that take the most toll on her mental, and she has various techniques to calm herself down.
She said: “The actual occasion, like, the fight night has not given me any anxiety, or trouble, or pressure. Sometimes the fight camp does, the volume of work I have to do and the amount of hours I have to perform gets me in a little bit of a spot sometimes.
“I’ve been doing a lot of mental work, doing a lot of meditation. With such a crazy schedule, I’ve been making sure I allocate a certain amount of time a day to just sit by myself and either read, or think, or listen to music and just calm myself, bring myself right down.
“‘Cause otherwise it’s a matter of… you’re always going from one session to the next, you finish one session, gotta go home and eat and then it’s the next session. So, I’ve been working very hard on bringing myself down and kind of re-centering myself between each session.
Jacinta Austin Full Exclusive Interview
You can watch the full interview with Jacinta Austin below:
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Featured image credits to Oktagon MMA
