UFC: City Kickboxing coach Mike Angove hired to lead UFC striking programme in China

Andrei Paulet, Eugene Bareman, Israel Adesanya, Mike Angove and Tristram Apikitoa following Adesanya's win over Marvin Vettori in June. Photo / Getty Images

Mike Angove has been in the right place at the right time.

The former kickboxing world champion has seen the rise of combat sports in New Zealand through the likes of K-1 stars Ray Sefo, Mark Hunt and David Tua, and is now one of the figures at the forefront of its resurgence.

After a lifetime of absorbing all the knowledge in the arena available to him and, more recently, working as a striking coach at Auckland's City Kickboxing gym, Angove has been snapped up by the UFC and tasked with heading the striking programme at the promotion's performance institute in Shanghai, China.

"I was fortunate to be around in the time of Achilles," Angove says. "I was around at the time of Kiwi warrior kings ... and those guys are why we're going through this period now.

"Very few people have the opportunity to work their passion, and now I have an opportunity to, in some respects, be at the tiller – certainly on the striking side – of a pretty big ship. That's exciting, and a daunting responsibility as well."

Making the difficult decision to move away from his family in order to support them, Angove will fly out to join the fold next week, as China looks to make its mark at the UFC level.

Several fighters from the Shanghai Performance Institute made their promotional debuts earlier this year, although showed there was work to be done.

Rong Zhu, Aori Qileng and Na Liang all made their UFC debuts on the same card in April, with all three being beaten. Zhu has since fought again, and earned his first UFC win in September.

Speaking about having to bring the fighters up to speed, Angove said China was a little bit behind in mixed martial arts as a sport, but he was excited about the challenge of getting the group to where they needed to be.

"There's a lot of raw athletic talent there ... the objective is to get these guys to elite level, so that is a combination of excitement, acceptance of a challenge and a little bit of nerves – because there are a lot of dynamics involved in it."

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Angove brings plenty of experience to the role. Outside of his own in-ring career, Angove has worked as an analyst and has also been part of the coaching team for some of New Zealand's biggest moments in the arena – including Israel Adesanya's UFC middleweight title win in front of more than 57,000 people in Melbourne.

He will become the latest in a growing list of New Zealand coaches plying their trade at the highest level around the world, along with the likes of Sefo, who works with some of the UFC's best at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, and Jayson Vemoa who coaches with Kyokushin in Japan.

"We have world class coaches in New Zealand. We can make our mark as coaches and as fighters and wear our silver fern.

"I get the chance to exercise a bit of a dream and be a full-time coach with one of the premier organisations in the world, at the home of martial arts.

"And to hedge a question I know you're going to ask – my Chinese is almost non-existent apart from nǐhǎo (hello) and xièxiè (thank you), so we're going to have to work through interpreters and do a lot of visual demonstrations so that's going to be a challenge, but let's see how things go."