The Reversed Decision at XVT 5

The ring announcer named Hermes Franca the winner, then changed the result to Ferrid Kheder. The reversal occurred on December 19, 2010, after the main event of Xtreme Vale Todo 5 at the San Luis Gonzaga High School Gymnasium in Cartago, Costa Rica. The announcement did not settle the contest. It created a second fight over who had actually won, who had recorded the scores, and who possessed the authority to alter the result once the athletes had left the cage.

Franca and Kheder had entered the bout with established credentials. Franca was a former UFC lightweight title contender. Kheder was a judo Olympian. Their identities gave the event a recognizable main event, but the dispute that followed was not about reputation. It concerned the basic administrative act that converts a performance into a result: the judges’ scores, the public announcement, and the official entry that remains after the crowd has gone.

The fight itself supplied a point of reference for Franca’s belief. In the third round, he took Kheder’s back twice and threatened a rear-naked choke. Those positions did not, by themselves, determine the judges’ decision, but they formed part of Franca’s understanding of what had happened inside the cage. Afterward, he said he believed he had won.

The first public result was Franca’s victory. Then the announcement moved to Kheder. The sequence placed the contradiction in front of everyone at the event rather than leaving it to a later database correction or a private disagreement between camps. A winner had been named, withdrawn, and replaced before the result could acquire the ordinary finality of a single official declaration.

The judges’ accounts deepened the conflict. Allan Benavides, Jeffry Lopez, and Ariel Simons each said they had scored the fight for Franca. Their reported consensus pointed in the same direction as the initial announcement and against the later declaration of Kheder as winner. The controversy therefore involved more than a disputed interpretation of one scorecard. It involved a public result that did not match the scoring those judges later described.

Jean-Francois Billon, an organizer and promoter associated with the event, gave a different explanation. He said he heard Kheder from the judges and described the post-fight problem as confusion. That account placed the failure at the point where the judges’ decision was communicated and announced. It did not erase the earlier declaration of Franca or the judges’ reported statements, but it supplied the explanation used by the event’s organizers for the reversal.

Lu Dwyer occupied a position that connected the competing interests around the bout. He was identified as Kheder’s main sponsor and as one of the financial sponsors of Xtreme Vale Todo. Within 48 hours of the fight, Dwyer contacted Sherdog’s MMA database and requested that the result be changed to a no contest. The request was the clearest post-fight intervention: not a new score, not a replay, but a demand that the contested result be removed.

That request changed the shape of the dispute. The question was no longer only whether Franca or Kheder had won. It became whether the proper administrative answer was to preserve Kheder’s announced victory, restore Franca’s initial result, or discard the decision altogether. A no contest would leave neither fighter with a win, converting the confusion at ringside into the formal status of the bout.

Sherdog’s event listing later recorded the Franca-Kheder bout as a no contest overturned by the promoter. The entry preserved the unusual sequence in compressed form: a fight held, a result changed, and a later status assigned through promoter action. It also separated the event’s final database classification from the initial announcement, showing that the result continued to move after the athletes had completed their work.

For Franca, the dispute carried a direct personal consequence. He believed he had won, and the reported statements of all three judges supported that belief. Yet the public result moved first to him, then to Kheder, and ultimately toward no contest. For Kheder, the later handling placed his announced victory under review, while his sponsor sought a classification that would remove the win from the official record.

The documented sequence ends with a result that could not maintain a single identity. XVT 5’s main event was fought in Cartago on December 19, 2010; Franca was initially announced as the winner; Kheder was then named; the judges were reported to have scored for Franca; and, within two days, Dwyer requested a no contest. The bout’s lasting significance lies in that chain of decisions, where the scorecards, the announcement, and the official classification failed to remain aligned.