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The former UFC interim welterweight champion and current title contender is getting ready to face Kamaru Usman at UFC 245, and he’ll be prepping right back at American Top Team, despite teammate drama.
Fighter relationships in MMA are always a precarious thing. The training partner an athlete works with today just may become the opponent they fight tomorrow. And while some fighters have gone on record saying they’d never be willing to fight the people they consider friends and teammates, relationships have a habit of being transitory. Just ask Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal.
Back in 2017, when ‘Chaos’ was making his first push toward title contention, Masvidal told MMA Junkie Radio, “The goal’s still the same: not fight each other and destroy everybody else.” Fast forward a couple years, and ‘Gamebred’ is just one of several voices (including Dustin Poirier and Joanna Jedrzejczyk) coming out of Covington’s home camp, American Top Team, publicly denouncing their teammate.
Things apparently got bad enough that Covington moved at least part of his camp to a more private facility to get away from the distractions. But, in a recent interview with Submission Radio, the former NCAA D1 All American wrestler revealed that he’s now back full time at ATT—with no intentions of leaving.
“Yeah, I’m back in American Top Team officially,” Covington said. “This is the homegrown gym that I started at. I started at American Top Team with Dan Lambert, he recruited me straight out of college wrestling. I’ve never been to another gym except for American Top Team, so this is where I started and this where I’ll finish. I can’t thank the godfather enough, Dan Lambert, for what he does for me and everything that he provides. So, my training goes according to plan so I can keep improving as a martial artist. I bleed American Top Team through and through, and I’ll finish my career with them.”
”It wasn’t more about training anywhere else,” he added. “It was more about just staying away from the distractions, the drama that’s going on at the gym. Obviously, everybody in the gym’s jealous of me. I’ve got a lot of haters in the world, and that’s just how the world is today. Everybody’s hates on people that are doing better than them. I can’t control other people’s feelings if they’re jealous and envious of where I’m at in my career, making more money than them, doing bigger things.”
Covington added that apparently ATT owner Dan Lambert stepped in on his behalf to lay out some rules so that interactions in the gym remained calm and professional. Maybe that will be enough to keep things calm at one of MMA’s biggest ‘super camps.’ Or, it may just be that Covington’s persona, and the drama that comes with it, will continue to play as big a part in his career as his performances inside the cage.
In front of Covington at the moment is a planned title fight against champion Kamaru Usman as the headliner to UFC 245, on December 14th, in Las Vegas, NV. The event is also expected to include a featherweight title fight between Max Holloway and Alexander Volkanovski, and a bantamweight title fight between Amanda Nunes and Germaine de Randamie.