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“To be quite honest, I don’t believe that. That’s all s—t.”
Alex Volkanovski isn’t buying that Max Holloway has only trained over Zoom for their upcoming featherweight title fight at UFC 251.
Holloway recently spoke about the strict lockdown restrictions in his native Hawaii that led to him not sparring throughout his entire camp. ‘Blessed’ said the first time he saw his coaches was at the airport in Las Vegas, with all his training for the fight being done over Zoom video calls.
“To be quite honest, I don’t believe that. That’s all s—t,” Volkanovski 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.”
Volkanovski and Holloway first met back at UFC 245 in December 2019, with Volkanovski winning a unanimous decision to become the new featherweight champion on the night. Volkanovski said his team were only permitted to leave Australia just hours before their flight departure.
“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.”
UFC 251 takes place Saturday, July 11th, on Fight Island, Abu Dhabi. Volkanovski vs Holloway 2 will serve as the co-main event.