Paradoxically for a professional fighter, it’s as a referee that Matthieu Letho Duclos has developed his image and popularity. Indeed, since 2018, he refereed at amateur fights, in videos that each rack up several million views, on the Youtube channel “IbraTV”. “I’d never refereed before this, so I reproduced on what I saw at the top level. Sometimes I stopped a little too early, sometimes a little too late. But who doesn’t make mistakes?” explains the 28-year-old. “Today, I may be a professional fighter, but people still associate me with that. But that’s all right! If they call me ‘the referee’, and the referee breaks people’s faces, that’s not bad, is it?” For, despite his Internet activities, Matthieu Letho Duclos remains first and foremost a top-level athlete, who has largely trained on the French amateur circuit since discovering MMA during his university studies.

“I have an instinct for fighting”

“Before, I used to do athletic strength, I even qualified for the French championships. But I got bored of lifting weights, so I switched to MMA without much experience in martial arts. Two months after my first registration, I was already going down to Paris to fight the Parisians. At the time, I really liked fighting and I had a good punch, so I threw a few punches without thinking. I scored a lot of knockouts, but that also cost me several defeats.” A few years later, this state of mind hasn’t left him, and is proving particularly effective in the HEXAGONE MMA cage, where he’s already racked up three consecutive wins before the limit. A superb dynamic, which will give him the opportunity to fight for the organization’s middleweight belt on February 10 in Dijon. “Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of progress in training. So I can’t wait to see what it looks like in the cage!”