Photo by Paul Kane/Zuffa LLC
With Kamaru Usman vs. Gilbert Burns off UFC 251 following Burns’ positive test for COVID-19, the fight between featherweight champ Alexander Volkanovski and Max Holloway has been promoted into Fight Island’s first main event slot.
That’s all good as far as Volkanovski is concerned.
“This was the real main event,” Volkanovski said in a new ESPN interview. “A lot of people thought this was the main event, so it’s in its rightful place.”
The Coronavirus continues to insert itself into every angle of this upcoming fight card in Abu Dhabi after a relatively quiet period where the UFC held events for a month at their UFC APEX facility in Las Vegas. Several fights on July undercards have been scrapped as fighters continue to test positive for the virus, with Usman vs. Burns the highest profile scratch. But even Volkanovski vs. Holloway came perilously close to not happening. It turns out Alexander’s ability to leave Australia and travel to Abu Dhabi was in question right up to the last minute.
Once again via ESPN:
“We didn’t get an exemption to leave Australia until about six hours before our flight,” Volkanovski said. “The team didn’t really let me know about that. They just wanted to get that out of the way. They did a good job in making that happen. They had to get the Abu Dhabi government to let us in, as well.”
On Holloway’s side, he claims to have done no in-person training in Hawaii for the fight due to lockdown laws that have kept his gym closed, instead opting for video conference coaching sessions via Zoom. For his part, Volkanovski isn’t buying this is actually the case.
“To be quite honest, I don’t believe that. That’s all s**t,” he told ESPN. “Whether he’s doing it to cover things on his end — I don’t want to accuse him of anything — but we had to get exemptions to train, so I couldn’t train until I got that done. So there was a lot that needed to happen for the government. Again, I’m not going to accuse him of anything, but I don’t believe that he hasn’t been training. I’m preparing for a fully prepared Max either way.”
We’re still a week away from UFC 251 kicking off the much-hyped Fight Island portion of the UFC’s Coronavirus event slate, and we imagine it’s going to be a wild ride seeing all the twists and turns and stories that come out of this ambitious attempt to collect fighters from around the world and quarantine them on Yas Island. As longtime MMA fans know, anything can and oftend does happen in this sport. Fingers crossed both Volkanovski and Holloway make it to the cage (in proper fighting shape) come July 11th.