Alexander Volkanovski thinks Australia's mainstream media ignores him because they don't understand his sport. He's wrong, and I suspect he knows it.
After defending his featherweight title at UFC 333 in Sydney, Volkanovski went on the Ariel Helwani Show and offered the most charitable read imaginable: "Maybe it's just not their sport." He said it upsets him "a little bit" that some of the mainstream media won't show what he's done, "or maybe they don't know." He's handing the people who snub him an excuse they did nothing to earn.
Australian sports desks already cover boxing without breaking a sweat, so they understand perfectly well the concept of one person hitting another person. What they've decided is that one version of that is worthy of the back page and the free-to-air bulletin, and the other is a gatecrasher. Boxing gets a historical pass because it's old and familiar. MMA gets treated like it wandered in uninvited, no matter how many records the bloke from Wollongong breaks.
The gatekeeping has already been stated out loud. In 2023, the Lord Mayor of Wollongong, Gordon Bradbery, refused to give Volkanovski the Keys to the City, saying he had a responsibility "not to endorse those things which are violent." His exact line: "You can decorate it as much as you like but UFC is a violent activity." He understood the sport fine. He just decided it was beneath the dignity of civic recognition.
While editors treat the sport as too grubby to feature, Australian governments have been paying to import it. New South Wales committed $16 million to bring four UFC events to Sydney over four years. Western Australia struck its own deal to host UFC and WWE cards in Perth, after UFC 284 there was estimated to have delivered tens of millions in economic benefit. Public money courts the sport for the tourism dollars. The press still can't be bothered to cover its biggest local star.
The public isn't responsible. They buy the pay-per-views and they packed out his Sydney homecoming. ESPN itself called him one of the most adored individual athletes the country has produced this century. The resistance sits with the legacy sports editors who still run a cricket-and-football hierarchy of what counts as a real sport, and who hand boxing a courtesy they've simply chosen to withhold from MMA.
Niche-sport champions get overlooked everywhere, and plenty of dominant fighters stay anonymous unless they're loud or they become movie stars. Volkanovski has now done the movie-star bit too, playing Joe in the Street Fighter film. But that argument stops working the moment a sitting mayor puts the real reason on the record: he saw the sport clearly and judged it beneath civic recognition.
The tell is what happened next. Wollongong reversed itself: a new Lord Mayor, Tania Brown, drove a motion to award the Keys after all, and the ceremony finally went ahead in 2025. The gatekeepers got dragged, late, into respecting a man they'd already decided to look down on. Volkanovski can keep giving them the benefit of the doubt. They haven't come close to deserving it.
