On May 12, 2021, Ramzan Kadyrov decided to host an impromptu live chat on Instagram with his followers.
Dressed in a grey tracksuit and matching baseball hat emblazoned with the Akhmat MMA fight club logo, the Chechen dictator answered a wide range of questions before focusing on his beloved combat sports. After boasting about the athletic prowess of Chechen athletes, Kadyrov went on a bizarre rant about former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, whom he referred to as a “UFC project.”
“Khabib is a good athlete, but he is a UFC project,” Kadyrov said during the Instagram live chat. “He is 100 percent a project because they have a good relationship with Dana White. If someone misses a fight, they are immediately removed from the rating, and Khabib has never been removed from the rating. And he also knows that he is a UFC project. If it is not a project, then I have never seen our brother Khabib perform with the flag of the Russian Federation, the flag of Dagestan
The Shady Legacy of Mikhail Ilyukhin
As some may guess based on my name, I was born in Russia, a country
with an incredibly rich, successful MMA tradition. It includes
legends regarded among the greatest ever, Fedor
Emelianenko and Khabib
Nurmagomedov, several other outstanding young champions who
have that potential, such as Petr Yan and
Vadim
Nemkov, and three highly successful domestic promotions in
M-1 Global, Absolute Championship Akhmat and Fight Nights Global.
And who was the first Russian MMA star that preceded all of this?
There were actually two: Oleg Taktarov
debuted in the UFC in April of 1995 and won UFC 6 in mid-July,
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Sterling: Pull-out Pete is paper champ, won UFC title by whooping ‘a lot of old men’
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Reigning UFC bantamweight titleholder Petr Yan will (finally) defend his 135-pound strap against No. 1-ranked division contender Aljamain Sterling at the UFC 259 pay-per-view (PPV) event, scheduled for this Sat. night (March 6, 2021) at APEX in Las Vegas.
For Sterling, this bout will give “No Mercy” the opportunity to prove he’s the real deal and not just the guy who was in the right place at the right time. The loss of TJ Dillashaw back in early 2019 blew the division wide open and Yan managed to capitalize.
UFC 259 odds: Petr Yan opens as slight betting favorite over Aljamain Sterling
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Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
UFC bantamweight titleholder Petr Yan will defend his 135-pound strap against No. 1-ranked division contender Aljamain Sterling at the UFC 259 pay-per-view (PPV) event, scheduled for Sat., March 6, 2021 in either Las Vegas or Abu Dhabi.
And he’ll do it as the -135 favorite.
That’s according to our fiscal friends over at BetOnline, who pegged “Funk Master” as the +115 betting underdog. With a line that close, don’t be surprised to see their positions flip-flop as money starts to pour in on both sides.