Thanh Le hints at potential challenge for the lightweight gold

Thanh Le came away from his first world title defense relatively unscathed and is now turning his attention to becoming a champ-champ in ONE Championship.

The ONE featherweight world champion scored a first-round victory over Garry Tonon at ONE: Lights Out last Friday. After the bout, cameras followed him backstage.

In the video, Thanh Le said:

“They got contenders coming up that were supposed to fight on this card – y’all battle it out to see who’s next. Obviously Martin’s [Nguyen] got a great performance, I’d love to fight him again but I was enjoying watching him. You got the next weight up, Christian [Lee], Ok [Rae Yoon], what’s up? Let’s do it! ”

The Vietnamese-American captured the world title from Martin Nguyen in 2020. While ‘The Situ-Asian’ had an impressive win on the card, the champ looks like he’d rather face new competition.

With Christian Lee still hungry to redeem himself from losing the ONE lightweight world championship to Ok Rae Yoon, Le wants to wait for them to settle their controversy first before he challenges the true king of that division.

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Thanh Le credits training with Ryan Hall

Thanh Le’s dominant performance against Garry Tonon would not have been possible without the help of Ryan Hall.

During the post-fight press conference, Le shared that his jiu-jitsu training helped a lot with his positional awareness when he got caught in Tonon’s leg lock.

“None of those strikes would have happened without that. Not even close. It all starts with base positioning, understanding the position, understanding the threats, understanding how to move your body in a way that would relieve some of the pressure and then put some of the pressure on him and his lock and then put myself in a position where I’m understanding where I should go next, in order to land solid punches. Nobody has better ground and pound in this game than Ryan Hall and we all haven’t got to see it yet, but one day you’ll see it, I’m sure, but I’m just trying to steal some of his stuff and I guess you saw some of it.”