El Matador’ Ilia Topuria, the UFC featherweight world champion, carved his toughness through daily street fights in his hometown, according to a book by his mother.
Ilia Topuria and Street Fighting
The Spanish-Georgian Ilia Topuria captured the UFC featherweight crown with a highly impressive knockout against the top-ranked pound-for-pound athlete Alexander ‘The Great’ Volkanovski. He then defended this throne by way of knockout against the all-time great ‘Blessed’ Max Holloway.
‘El Cazador’ Aleksandre Topuria is the brother of Ilia and is an MMA fighter as well. Their mother Inga recently wrote a book about them and tells a story about their days of street fighting. She said:
“I mentioned fights and this was about street fights. It was not rare, it was a daily routine. Whenever they were in the streets, they were fighting. To imagine – Three boys would appear. They looked like they had just watched “Scarface” movie and didn’t know what to do.
“They would come and tell you that they wanted your hat or your belt. There were three ways – giving up, running away and fighting. There was a fourth one – finding a mutual friend, but this fourth one was a bit difficult, so Ilia and Sandro always prefered to fight and surprisingly, at the end of the day, they always had a hat and a belt.
“It was not about the things, it was about to secure/defend their place in the streets. It’s where they realized that the way to their biggest (Championship) belts started with keeping their own, ordinary belts in the streets of Rustavi.”
I'm reading the book "Mother & Ilia" which is dedicated to the story of Ilia Topuria's mother, Inga, who is from Abkhazia, a region of Georgia occupied by Russia.
There is a part of the story about Ilia and his brother, Aleksandre, fighting in the streets of Rustavi, Georgia. I… pic.twitter.com/X1lxbx6jKA
— Giorgi Kokiashvili
(@iHeartGeorgius1) October 30, 2024
(@iHeartGeorgius1)
The family grew up in Rustavi, Georgia which was destroyed during the Mongol invasions in the 13th century and remained largely abandoned until the 20th century. The modern city of Rustavi was rebuilt in the 1940s with industrialization efforts. It has faced significant economic challenges after the collapse of the Soviet Union