Since Ilia Topuria arrived in the UFC, he’s become a somewhat divisive character despite the fact that he backs up what he says inside the Octagon. The current featherweight champion has always carried himself with supreme self confidence.
Though it’s clearly a major asset of his, it does lead to some fans reading this as arrogance, especially when he’s going up against long-time fan favorites like Alexander Volkanovski and Max Holloway. Topuria said multiple times before his fight with Volkanovski that it was already written for him to become the champion and though he respected “The Great”, it was no longer his time to sit at the top of the 145-pound division.
In the lead up to his first title defense against Holloway this weekend at UFC 308, “El Matador” has been his usual confident self, claiming that he will be the first man to knock the former champion out. Some might say that this is Topuria just trying to sell the fight or that he’s playing up his own confidence just because there’s a microphone in front of him.
A training partner of his in Spain says that this is completely the opposite to an act that Topuria puts on for the cameras. In a recent interview with The Scrap, Miguel Navarro gave his insight into the fight as someone who knows the champion well.
Navarro trained with the champ at Climent Club in Alicante but has continued to make the trip to Madrid to train with him now that Topuria has moved. He says that his fellow Spaniard is always extremely self-assured, claiming that if anything, he tones it down for interviews rather than amplifying it.
“Yeah, he’s always like that. That’s not like a role or something. Personal treatment, he’s like that and I think even more than in the interviews, even more. If you know all his people, everyone thinks like him. Everyone doesn’t have like piece of doubt, any piece of doubt.”
