n September 2014, at the Bellator tournament, it took American athlete Brandon Halsey only 35 seconds to get to Alexander Shlemenko's legs, topple him to the floor and catch him in a choke hold. The Russian tried to escape, but ultimately lost consciousness. The rematch had to wait for three whole years.After that fight, Halsey developed his success and, having knocked out Kendal Grove in the next fight, climbed up to 15th place in the world rankings. However, in the next fight, he lost to Rafael Carvalho and was also forced to give up the Bellator champion belt. The first attempt to negotiate a rematch with Brandon's team was made at the beginning of 2017, but the parties could not come to an agreement on the weight category in which this fight could take place. But on the second try, all the nuances were sorted out and the long-awaited duel took place on June 1, 2017 at the M-1 Challenge 79 tournament in St. Petersburg.
After that defeat, Alexander Shlemenko had a series of victories. In addition to performing overseas, he presented Russian viewers with two epic battles against Vyacheslav Vasilevsky, which you can watch on our channel, and began the 2017 season with a beautiful victory over the impenetrable American fighter Paul Bradley. In the fourth fight in the M-1 Challenge rage, an old acquaintance was waiting for Alexander. Shlemenko never had problems with motivation for a fight and the desire to show a spectacular fight, and in this case, one could be sure that his attitude was simply outrageous.