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Jessica Andrade is a mixed martial artist from Brazil. She currently holds a record of 21 - 8 - 0 and is signed to the UFC. However, Growing up, when it came to sports, MMA wasn’t on top of Andrade’s list. In a piece with The Players Tribune, Jessica wrote the following -
"In Umuarama, I grew up playing football, which to my family was also not a girl’s thing, to be honest. Playing football was my biggest passion. I wanted to be on TV, to be just like Marta. I even had a knack for it. I was offered to play for São Paulo, one of the biggest clubs in Brazil. But my mother wouldn’t let me go. She was afraid that someone would kidnap me, or that something else would happen. I’ve always respected her, so I ended up not taking the offer. I needed to find another path. But what path?"
However, she always had fighting roots in her. An interesting story she shares in the above piece is how she saved his brother from a drug dealer -
"Ever since I was a child, I liked to play fight with my brother. One day at school, he was being threatened by a drug dealer — the most dangerous guy in the neighbourhood, actually. I joined their fight in order to protect my brother, and I just hit the drug dealer with kick after kick and landed a punch so hard to his face that he started bleeding."
Fast forward to 2013, she was signed by the UFC. She is a former UFC women’s strawweight champion and the first women to get a win in three weight divisions (strawweight, bantamweight and flyweight)
Andrade will be facing Valentina Shevchenko for the flyweight championship on 24th April 2021.
Andrade is openly gay. In 2017, after her loss to Jonna Jedrezeczyk, Andrade proposed to her girlfriend, Fernanda Gomes. This was the first ever in - ring proposal in the UFC.
The couple were in a long term relationship prior and finally tied the knot in 2019 at a ceremony in Las Vegas.
The couple had a nasty incident in 2019. They were robbed in Niteroi (a town in Brazil). Fernanda confirmed the news via her Facebook account by the following statement -
“Friends, our car was stolen, and they took our phones with it, we are out of reach for now, except for messenger. Anyone who can, please share this so we can find the car. We are safe at home,”
Jessica Andrade’s wife, Fernanda Gomes is a biologist. Gomes shares a quite similar love for Jiu - Jitsu. It is known that she practices the art along with her father and Andrade.
As a public figure, she is only known to be the wife of Andrade and hence not many details about her are public.
She has over 9k followers on Instagram. However, her account is currently private.
The couple currently doesn’t have any kids. However, in 2017 speaking to MMA Fighting the couple revealed their plans of starting a family through artificial insemination. According to Playersgf.com, the couple dreamed of having twins.
