Khamzat Chimaev
No. 3-ranked welterweight Khamzat Chimaev was the subject of a savage rant by Colby Covington on Saturday night at UFC 286.
The event went down on Saturday night in London, England at the O2 Arena. Covington flew into the UK to fill the role of backup fighter for the 170-pound championship headliner between champion Leon Edwards and the man he took the belt from, Kamaru Usman.
However, Covington wasn’t needed as both men made the walk to the Octagon. So, “Chaos” attended UC 286 as a spectator and he took time to speak with the media backstage. During the scrum, Chaos seized the opportunity to unload on Chimaev, focusing on how “Borz” missed weight by nearly nine pounds when he was scheduled to fight Nate Diaz, as well as Chimaev’s UFC hiatus due to lingering side effects from contracting COVID-19.
Covington called “dog-faced motherf***** ‘C*mshot” unprofessional, and continued:
“He talks all this s***, dude. He said all these things about me in the media. Yeah, of course, they say things in the media. They don’t say things to my face or in the Octagon. He’s been saying, ‘Oh, I want to fight for the title at 170. I want to fight Colby. This and that.’ Dude, the guy quit to the common cold. The guy quit f****** on a weight cut when he had the best professionals that the UFC [Performance Institute] can offer — millions of dollars put into this guy in marketing.
“And he had the easiest fight in the division, the soy boy Nate Diaz. And he still couldn’t make weight. He missed weight by nine pounds and he’s laughing it off like this is a f****** joke. He’s a f****** joke. The guy f****** sucks at fighting. He’s unprofessional and I don’t ever want to hear that guy’s name again. You guys hype him up to be this great giant, the guy couldn’t hold my f****** jockstrap.”
Covington Said He Was Never Offered a Fight With Chimaev, Wanted to Battle Borz Until His Major Weight Miss
Covington was then asked if the UFC had offered him a match with Chimaev. UFC president Dana White had said before Chimaev’s fight with Gilbert Burns last year that he wanted to pair Chaos and the Russian-born athlete. Borz ultimately defeated Burns but the fight never came to fruition. And according to Covington, the UFC didn’t offer it to him.
“It was never formally presented to me,” Covington answered. “We talked about it. It was the fight that I wanted. I wanted to derail that hype train. Everybody was building him up to be colossal like he was this great fighter. I saw the quitter in him from the start. I knew he had no cardio, I knew I would expose his gas tank and make him break inside five rounds.
“The guy quit in three rounds. I mean, what’s he going to do when he gets p*rnstar cardio from ‘The Cardio King’ for five rounds? So, I was begging for the fight. I was chomping at the bit, but we saw how unprofessional he was. They gave him the easiest fight — Nate Diaz — to set it up to fight me the next fight, to build this up and make it a spectacle. And he couldn’t do it.
“The guy’s a clown,” Covington continued. “I don’t ever want to hear that guy’s name in this division again. Let that dogfaced motherf***** rot in [185 pounds].”
White Said Chimaev Would Move Up to Middleweight for His Next Fight
Although he sits in the welterweight top five due to his victory over Burns, his last match was at a 180-pound catchweight against Kevin Holland. And the UFC president told the media this week that Borz would return to the middleweight division for his next outing.
“He’ll fight at middleweight, yeah,” White said. “He’s in a position where he should be fighting [the] top-three guys in the world.”