Yeah, the Dutch fighters back then were just jacked. Of course, the rules on drug testing, particularly in Japanese promotions, were… shall we say, lax compared to the modern day. Which is why you would get fighters like Alistair Overeem coming in looking like championship bodybuilders. Back then, the “Ubereem” was just plain terrifying. He would walk into the ring in Pride looking like an absolute beast.

Interestingly, Dutch kickboxing forced a number of changes to muay thai as well. Back in the early 90s, MT scoring rules had changed in the stadiums to favour kicks over punches – the second-highest scoring technique back then, apparently, was a kick to the neck. (I took a shin-bone to the neck once. Even though the other guy was wearing shin-pads, it SUCKED.) So nak muay trained to win fights on points, and de-emphasised boxing skills.

That all changed when Dutch fighters like Rob Kaman, Ramon Dekkers, Ernesto Hoost, and others arrived on the scene and started fighting in both domestic and international MT competitions. They began winning by knocking out Thai fighters with punches. “Mr. Low Kick” Kaman was particularly notorious for this – he would blast his opponent’s legs with low kicks and then set up very hard, very heavy punches behind those kicks.

At first the Thais were incredulous and didn’t want to change anything – they figured that their kick-based style could defeat the “farangs” easily enough. But it didn’t work. So they adapted and started learning more punch-based techniques.

You can see this evolution by watching the Buakawminator’s run in K-1. If you watch his fights in the 2004 K-1 MAX Grand Prix, you’ll see that he absolutely smashed both Kohiruimaki and Masato with knees and kicks. But in the 2005 final against Andy Souwer, he lost to a narrow split decision. In my view, he was robbed, but he saw clearly that it was Souwer’s punching power and boxing that gave him the edge in that fight.

So Buakaw went back to basics and started training heavily in boxing, incorporating a much more punch-heavy style with boxing slips and weaves into his base style of MT. The result was that he came back in 2006 and KO’d both Sato and Souwer with punches, not kicks.

Today MT has evolved as an art to be more complete and well-rounded. But, as Samart Payakaroon points out, in Thailand itself, the art has regressed. The influence of the gamblers has created a clinch-heavy style that emphasises power and brute strength, not technique or skill.

This will all self-correct eventually. MT has evolved dramatically as an art since its origins in muay boran, and will continue to move and refine itself as international competition becomes tougher. Fortunately, it has progressed, whereas a lot of other traditional martial arts have not.