Jörgen Kruth will be fighting at the Rumble Of The Kings event in Malmö on the 22nd of May. It is always special to fight in front of a home crowd. I will be ready for anything and anyone.


Jörgen Kruth is an double Muay Thai world champion, he has won three different K-1 elimination tournaments and fought the K-1 elite in Japan. Just a week ago a new chapter in Jörgens career was written when he made his professional MMA debut at the WFC 8 event in Slovenia, a fight that he won in the first round due to a vicious ground and pound. It is obvious to say that this was a great start to his new MMA career, but the question is why has he decided to switch to MMA, what are his ambitions in the sport and what about K-1?

 

Kruth: I have always been fascinated by MMA and actually started to train it more then ten years ago. But back then I did not have the time to fully commit to it since I was in the middle of my K-1 / Muay Thai career and so there for I only trained MMA on my spare time.
The big change for me came two years ago when I was in the US helping out Dan Henderson with his preparations for his fight versus Quinton Jackson at UFC 75. I trained together with Dan and Terry Sokoudjou at the Team Quest gym for six weeks and this really got me motivated to start training MMA seriously myself. Since then my focus has been on MMA and I have been booked for a couple of different fights this last year, but due to injuries and other issues my debut got a bit delayed.

The fight last weekend in Slovenia was a good fight for me, I could almost say an easy fight for me. My opponent Arturas Liutika took the fight on a short notice and I want to thank him for stepping up against me. He hade some good boxing and caught me with one or two shots when we stood toe to toe early in the round so I took a step back, delivered a round house kick to his midsection and then followed up with knees from clinch, it took the gas out of him and so I got him on the ground and just pounded him with my fists. It feels great to finally have fought my first MMA fight, and to win it, that was really important for me.

Up next I will be fighting at the Rumble Of The Kings event in Malmö on the 22nd of May. It feels like that fight also is kind of a debut fight for me. It is always special to fight in front of a home crowd, and I have a lot of good friends in Malmö. It is also the first time that my Swedish fans will get the opportunity to se me fight in MMA. I am really looking forward to that event and it feels good to know that I will have friends and fans backing me up. There hasn’t been any official announcement yet on who I am about to fight, but negotiations is in progress and who I will fight will soon be reviled. This week I have been taking it a bit easier in training, reloading myself and gathering new energy, but on Monday its back to bussnines with intense training consisting of sparring, wrestling and Muay Thai. I can promise you that on the 22nd of May I will be ready for anything and anyone.

I cant say that I have any specific goal with my MMA career, I just want to take one fight at the time and become an even better fighter. But I would offcourse like to fight in either the UFC or Japanese DREAM, like, work my way up the ladder, fight the best, hopefully beat them, and become the best myself. At the moment it seems and feels like DREAM is a good way for me to go since I have fought a lot in Japan before and the fans there already knows who I am, but like I said nothing is decided yet.

K-1 feels like a closed chapter for me right now, been there done that kind of thing, but if the right offer and right opponent would appear I might consider a K-1 fight anyway, I am not closing that door for good but its not my first priority anymore. Muay Thai on the other hand is still very interesting, I really want to become the -95Kg WMC title holder. I have fought Alexey Ignashov twice for that title and not managed to get it so a new shot at it would be great. But first I want to wait and see how my MMA career develops. I am 35 years old now so maybe in a few years when I am about to retire, it would be a great final fight for me and a good way to say goodbye to the sport that I have been active in almost all of my life.

Further Jörgen speaks more about his good MMA training at pancrase gym with Omar Bouiche, his work with kids at Lugna gatan and also the strange rumours on the internet that the fight in Slovenia would have been some kind of a secret fight, which it of course wasn’t, it was official for more then a month even though his original opponent got replaced.
Jörgen also mentions his gratitude to his sponsors www.wesc.com/ and www.flygpoolen.se/

Details regarding the Rumble Of The Kings event that Jörgen will participate in can be found at www.k-1.se and more information about Jörgen can be read at his homepage www.jorgenkruth.com

Written by Daniel / www.fansofk1.com

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