It’d didn’t take long for Khamzat Chimaev to respond to Colby Covington’s antagonistic comments that he “quit” the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Welterweight division.
Covington has been nowhere to be seen for the past year, but returned with a bang at UFC 286, which took place this past weekend (Sat., March 18, 2023) inside The O2 in London, England. Not only did he weigh-in to be the back-up for the Leon Edwards vs. Kamaru Usman 170-pound title fight, UFC President, Dana White, declared him the next challenger for Edwards — who defeated Usman in UFC 286’s main event — after the event (full details here).
Somewhere between those moments, Covington went in front of the press and trash talked Khamzat pretty heavily, claiming the Chechen fighter blew the chance to fight him by missing weight badly at UFC 279 in Sept. 2022.
“Colby is lying. He doesn’t want to fight. I swear with everything I have,” Chimaev said in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel. “I swear with the Gods. I accept the fight four times. All the Muslims understand, I swear to Quran. I get four times call, ‘you want to fight?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I have conversations with Sean Shelby that show it as well that we’re going to fight with this guy, but it never happened.
“That is normal, you know? You can lie on press conference, they make it like show,” he continued. “For me, no, I can’t lie for people. I’m the real. I’m who I am. If they like it, if they don’t like who I am, well. That guy play too much. I see at [UFC Performance Institute], when he see me, he turn around, run somewhere, I don’t see him any more.
“Now you know I’m going up [to 185], the fights, and other guys. He want to fight, just come up like me. Try to come up. Like, everyone’s talking about ‘He doesn’t want to fight him.’ I fight everybody. If he want to fight, fight. For me weight class doesn’t matter. If UFC calls me to fight Brock Lesnar, I fight with him. For me, doesn’t matter. Fight everybody, which weight class UFC wants, I fight. I never chose my fights.
“These chickens, they lie so much,” he finished. “So many guys speak on the internet, want to fight Khamzat, want to fight Khamzat. But why I’m still here, brother, with no fights. Almost half year or more, more than half year.”
And according to White, Chimaev will have to wait until October when the UFC returns to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to fight again. Indeed, the promotion is doing everything it can to stack UFC 294, a major international pay-per-view (PPV) card. Not only will Khamzat be shelved for seven months in anticipation of the event, but Lightweight champion, Islam Makhachev, too.
Hopefully by then, UFC manages to find someone willing to sign a contract to fight Chimaev. These days it seems like the biggest challenges “Borz” faces in his career is finding opponents.