Maliha Ali has won a bronze medal at the IMMAF World Championships in Tbilisi, Georgia, and she did it while carrying injuries that would have kept most fighters out of the cage altogether. The twenty-four-year-old from Hunza in Gilgit-Baltistan fought through a fractured toe, a badly bruised eyelid and a partially dislocated jaw to reach the semi-finals of the women’s featherweight division, and her run only ended when she lost a disputed split decision to Russia’s Polina Baldina. The Pakistan MMA Federation has now lodged a formal appeal against that result, arguing that its fighter was denied a place in the final by judging it cannot accept.
Neither woman took clear control of all three rounds. Baldina seemed to have the better of the second, while the first and third were fiercely contested, and Maliha landed the cleaner strikes in the closing round. When the final bell sounded, she raised her arms, convinced she had done enough to win. The judges, however, could not agree with each other, let alone with her. One of them scored the bout thirty to twenty-seven in Baldina’s favour, handing her every round. Another scored it twenty-nine to twenty-eight for Maliha. The third gave it twenty-nine to twenty-eight to Baldina. Two cards to one, and the Russian went through to the final.
Omar Ahmed, the president of the Pakistan MMA Federation, did not hide his anger. He said Maliha had clearly won the fight and that Pakistan had been robbed of a victory. The federation has since written formally to the head of the IMMAF Refereeing and Judging Commission, asking for a round-by-round breakdown of the scoring, an explanation for why the three scorecards differed so sharply, and a face-to-face technical review of the bout. The letter also notes that Pakistan suffered a similar split-decision semi-final defeat at last year’s championships.
Ahmed went further, alleging that fighters from former Soviet countries receive favourable treatment from judges and hold significant influence over refereeing decisions. He noted that Russia had entered two fighters in each weight category and had secured a multimillion-dollar budget through national sponsors, while Pakistan had no representative at all on the judging panel. Those are serious claims, and they will be difficult to prove, but they reflect a frustration that has been building inside the Pakistani camp.
What makes Maliha’s bronze all the more remarkable is the state she was in when she fought. The fractured toe, the bruised eyelid and the dislocated jaw were all picked up during the tournament itself, and before the semi-final Ahmed asked her directly whether she could go on. Her answer, as he later described it, was that she was fighting from the heart and that her injured hands and feet mattered less than the chance in front of her.
Her road to the semi-final had been anything but easy. In her opening bout she faced Veronika Drozdova, a two-time European champion from Russia, and beat her by split decision, a result that announced her as a genuine contender. She followed that with a unanimous-decision victory over Andrea Gabriela Guzman Salazar of Mexico, a Pan American champion, to book her place in the last four. Her semi-final opponent was no less decorated. Baldina, twenty-three, had previously won a world title under another MMA federation in Khanty-Mansiysk in 2024 and had won three bouts on her way to the final in Tbilisi.
Maliha is a wushu champion and a national kickboxing gold medallist, and she came into this tournament after winning a silver medal at the IMMAF World Cup in Angola earlier this year. Her twin sister Manesha, who won gold at that same World Cup in Angola, was also in action in Tbilisi, but her campaign ended in the quarter-finals of the lightweight division, where she lost a narrow split decision to Poland’s Martyna Caruk in the seventy point three kilogram class.
After the World Cup in Angola, the team organised a six-week training camp and brought in an international jiu-jitsu and grappling coach to work on the weaknesses exposed in that competition.
There is also a telling contrast in resources behind this result. Russia arrived in Tbilisi with more than sixty athletes, government backing and one of the best-funded programmes in the sport. Pakistan’s campaign at last year’s championships in the same city was reported to have been financed entirely through private sponsorship, with no government money at all. That gap makes Maliha’s medal a considerable achievement in its own right.
The appeal remains pending, and there is no guarantee it will change anything. Appeals against judges’ decisions rarely succeed in combat sports. What is certain is that Maliha leaves Tbilisi with a bronze medal, a reputation that has grown far beyond Pakistan, and a claim, in her federation’s view, to something more. For a fighter who competed with a broken toe and a dislocated jaw and still believed she had won, that may be the part that stays with her longest.
