Sean Strickland has a lot of problems with Khamzat Chimaev, but he just added another grievance after the UFC middleweight champion suddenly released a short clip from a past training session on social media.
The 25-second clip doesn’t show much at all outside of Chimaev and Strickland jabbing away at each other but the video was accompanied by a caption saying “I am bullying weak people.” The comment from Chimaev comes after Strickland accused him of picking and choosing lower level fighters as sparring partners rather than seeking out bigger and better competition in the gym.
Strickland says Chimaev releasing the sparring footage only proves his point when it comes to one of his biggest complaints about his upcoming opponent.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Strickland said at UFC 328 media day. “The guy’s just a little f*cking rat. One, I didn’t know we were filming. Those are our warmup rounds.
“You’re just a weak man. You’re just a weak, weak man. It’s like what is the point? We’re light sparring. I mean those shorts are a little questionable on my part. They were Amazon. It was a bad angle.”
All jokes aside, Strickland claims he only actually sparred Chimaev once but he tried to get more time in the cage with the future UFC champion.
Unfortunately, he says Chimaev wanted no part of it so there really wasn’t much to gain from that brief interaction from the past.
“We’ve only sparred once and we did like a three-round spar,” Strickland said. “We sparred once. I kept telling you this. When I got to a gym, I want to spar the best guy. I want to spar him but he would always just go beat up the lower level guys.”
As far as Chimaev stating that he actually called the UFC and asked for this fight specifically, Strickland has no idea if that’s true or no.
All Strickland knows for certain is that the UFC made the right call booking this fight against Chimaev, especially knowing the lack of great options below him in the rankings.
“I think it’s also a good fight, it’s a fun fight,” Strickland said. “There’s so many people in the division where it’s like what are the top five? Brendan Allen? [Khamzat’s] f*cking punching bag. His meat. What else in the top five in the division do you have right now? It’s kind of nice just to get a fresh look, new blood. I think the fight just kind of made sense.”
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