This topic always brings out the newbs who didn't watch in Aldos prime.
Aldo started fighting when he was 17 years old and he was world champ at 23 years old making him one of the youngest world champs ever.
When he started losing, he was already 12 years and 27 fights into his career, and he fought in the 'gym wars' era where they were basically having full on fights in the gym on a regular basis. His knees where shot and he was fighting without his most effective weapons of his early days, his viscious leg kicks and muay thai knees.
Both Aldo and Volk fought twice against a LW champion who held the lightweight title during their respective FW reign.
Aldo was a dominant 2-0 vs Frankie Edgar. Volk is 0-2 vs Islam.
Aldo as a non English speaker was not allowed to challenge for double champ status, instead he was told he would have to vacate before challenging, a crazy double standard considering Conor was allowed to keep the FW title while taking 3 fights outside of FW, losing one of them and never defending his belt a single time.
If Aldo was given the same opportunities as English speaking champs he would have had a VERY good chance to have held THREE belts. As I said he beat Frankie twice who held 155 while Aldo had won his 6th consecutive FW title fight. During this same time, Aldos teammate Renan Barao, who was exactly the same size as Aldo, won 4 UFC title fights including 2 over Uriah Faber, who Aldo had already dominated.
Aldo won his first 10 title fights and had 4 stoppages. He beat 9 different fighters
Volk is 6-2 thru 8 title fights with 2 stoppage wins and a ko loss.
Volk has beaten 4 different opponents in title fights.
Volk has had a great run but he still has work to do to catch Aldo, and at 35 it is highly unlikely he will do it.
It is one thing to pretend that a smaller amount of recent victories surpasses nearly twice as many title victories for some reason, but it doesn't account for the fact that achieving that longevity means fighting thru injury, fighting against a wider variety of stylistic matchups, continuing to win even when older and accumulated injuries mean that you have less tools to work with.
