It’s been over two years since Christian Lee last fought but there were plenty of questions about whether or not he would ever compete again following the tragic death of his sister Victoria Lee.
The now 26-year-old two division ONE Championship champion was rocked alongside everybody else in his family after Victoria took her own life in December 2022. The tragedy sent shockwaves through the entire fight world but the Lee family was understandably altered forever.
In the wake of Victoria’s death, former ONE strawweight champion Angela Lee ultimately decided to retire from competition to put her focus on a non-profit organization she launched focused on mental health. The Lee’s family martial arts gym shut down permanently and Christian took a long hiatus from the sport.
“Initially, of course I didn’t want to do anything,” Lee told MMA Fighting. “I closed my gym down. I wasn’t thinking about fighting. But there came a point in time where I was ready to re-open the gym again and I was also ready to get back to work.
“For me, the line of work I chose is fighting. I trained my whole life, committed my whole up until now into being a professional fighter. So for me, it was just time to get back to work, time to feed my family again. I never planned on retiring from this sport.”
While the Lee family gym remains closed, Christian opened up his own facility in Hawaii but even that was a labor of love for the first few months because he was primarily working alongside his younger brother Adrian Lee as he prepared to make his move into MMA.
ONE Championship CEO Chatri Sityodtong admits he had reservations about bringing Adrian into the fold after Victoria’s tragic death but he ultimately relented and signed the teenage prospect. Christian then took it upon himself to make sure that Adrian had every resource available — perhaps most importantly an older brother that took time away from his own fight career to focus on him.
“I was happy to shift the focus over to my brother,” Lee said. “He was able to get his first two wins in that time. For me, I’m not just focused on my career anymore. I’m also focused on building his as well.”
“Getting back into the gym, for a long period of time it was just me and my brother, one on one, the two of us. I was focused on training him and building him up. In that short amount of time, we had like six months of just training one on one with each other. He improved so quickly. He really went from a young high school kid to a true professional fighter.”
Now as he prepares to resume his own career on Friday with a welterweight title defense booked against Alibeg Rasulov in Thailand, Lee is ready to get back to work.
Lee admits the time off was obviously necessary but it was also beneficial because he had basically been fighting non-stop since he first signed with ONE when he was only 16 years old.
A decade later, Lee is a two-division champion and arguably the top pound-for-pound fighter in the entire organization but those accomplishments came largely due to a relentless schedule that he kept over the years.
“The time off was good mentally and physically,” Lee said. “When you put so much time in, 10 years in this sport, definitely it takes a toll on you. At 26, in some ways I feel like an old man, because I started off my career so young.
“Now we have our gym Prodigy Training Center up and running and we’ve got our fight team built up. A lot of talented fighters at Prodigy that will be up on the big stage as well and now in the room, I’m the old guy. It’s funny because I was always the youngest guy in the room but now with my gym open and my fight team built, I’m the old guy in the room.”
It’s tough to imagine anyone feeling old at 26 but Lee has actually learned to embrace being the elder statesman in his gym. He already embraced his role as coach and mentor to his younger brother but now he’s handing out that same knowledge to the next generation of martial artists following in his footsteps.
“It’s definitely a lot of work,” Lee said. “But I feel like I’m at a time in my life, this is the time to work the hardest that I’ve ever worked and I’m prepared to put in all of the hours. I used to train at 9 a.m. in the morning. I shifted it over to start at 5:30 a.m. So I wake up everyday at 4:30 a.m., I get morning training from like 5:30 to 9. Then from there, I just have that time to go back home and spend with my wife and my kids, still have that family time and then I’m back in the gym working with the kids and my adult classes and then working with all my fighters and students that I’m training.
“It’s a busy day. It starts very early in the morning, sometimes my family we’re eating dinner at 9 p.m. at night but it feels good to work hard and to be able to give back at the same time.”
