Dakota Ditcheva has become the face of the PFL, and one of the most marketable fighters in the sport, but even as she hits the prime of her career at 27 years old, she\u2019s already thinking about the day she calls it a career.<\/p>\n
As she prepares for her return to action for the first time in over a year after dealing with injuries, Ditcheva recently mentioned that she was eyeing retirement by 32, but that\u2019s not exactly a steadfast deadline. Instead, Ditcheva clarified those remarks by explaining why she\u2019s even talking about retirement at this stage of her career, especially as she\u2019s just now starting to reach her true potential.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that is what I\u2019ve seen my whole life is fighters say \u2018you know I\u2019m just fighting basically for the money now\u2019 or \u2018I\u2019m fighting just because I can\u2019t let go of it,\u2019\u201d Ditcheva explained when speaking to MMA Fighting. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be in a position where I can\u2019t let go of fighting. I want to be able to love other things at the same time. That\u2019s my goal. I\u2019m not saying 32, but I do want a family and children, and that\u2019s a very hard thing to build when you\u2019re putting so much into your career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI live a single life, all the time, it\u2019s so difficult to even think about one day having a family and it\u2019s important to me. I feel like I have to have that cutoff in the back of my mind to be like, I can be done with it at this age and move onto something else. I don\u2019t want to be one of them people that\u2019s like oh yeah, I\u2019m going to retire and then has to come back until I\u2019m 38. I don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ditcheva definitely has a lot more she wants to accomplish in the sport before she retires, but she\u2019s also well aware that even some of the best fighters in the history of the sport struggle to walk away when it\u2019s time.<\/p>\n
She learned a valuable lesson about the difficulty she might face one day when thinking about retirement after she ran through the PFL women\u2019s flyweight tournament, which crowned her as champion at the end.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like us as fighters are never satisfied,\u201d Ditcheva said. \u201cI felt it already winning a PFL world championship tournament. I thought I was going to be like oh my god, I\u2019ve got this crazy feeling like I\u2019ve done it! I was over it in two days. Our careers are always going to be like that. We\u2019re going to have this really big high and then it\u2019s like now what?\u201d<\/p>\n
Ditcheva has also gained a lot of valuable advice about the right time to walk away from fighting from her mother, who was a multi-time kickboxing champion during her own career.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mom\u2019s always made it really clear to me that one of her biggest mistakes was she never set herself [up] for after fighting,\u201d Ditcheva said. \u201cThat\u2019s why she says to me now \u2018you\u2019ve got to know your worth, you\u2019ve got to get paid right, you\u2019ve got to go into business and put your money in the right places\u2019 and also you want to be a public figure that can go into other things like commentating, or I can run a gym afterwards, or I can do a bit of modeling somewhere, or I can be an actor. That\u2019s kind of where I\u2019m at with all this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right now, Ditcheva is solely focused on her next fight at the PFL New York City card in July and then hopefully getting more active after missing so much time with a hand injury.<\/p>\n
But acknowledging that she doesn\u2019t want to fight forever just makes Ditcheva that much more motivated to accomplish everything she wants before time runs out.<\/p>\n
While she\u2019s not saying 32 years old is definitively when she\u2019s done with fighting, Ditcheva also doesn\u2019t want to overstay her welcome or stick around MMA for the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why she\u2019s already thinking about a future beyond MMA but that\u2019s still years away from now.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to be 32 thinking yeah, I\u2019m going to retire and now I\u2019m like now what?\u201d Ditcheva said. \u201cI want to set a time and OK I\u2019m 32, I\u2019m done, let\u2019s move onto something else or 33, that type of thing. I just want to not be a person that\u2019s going to be here forever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dakota Ditcheva has become the face of the PFL, and one of the most marketable fighters in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,1863,8417,82,3194],"class_list":["post-834012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-pfl","tag-pfl-news","tag-sports","tag-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}