UFC fighter Khamzat Chimaev missed out his fight against Nate Diaz last year as he didn’t come close to making weight for his originally arranged fight against Diaz, however, now he desperately wants to go head-to-head anyway against him. Chimaev missed the weight so terribly that the whole card was shuffled
His original opponent, Diaz, instead wound up facing and defeating Tony Ferguson, a much more appropriate match-up given where everyone was at in their professional careers. Chimaev told UFC interviewer Megan Olivi that he offered to give Diaz his purse to have the UFC 279 main event to go on as scheduled.
“I could make that weight, so the doctor stopped that s–t. So yeah, what I could do now? I was waiting what UFC said to me. I said I wanna fight, so I gave all my money to [Diaz]. It was almost two million. So I said, ‘Give all my money to that guy, let him fight.’ If he is that gangster, he should fight for money. But he didn’t wanna fight me, you know? So, who’s the gangster now?”
He didn’t want to fight me and just found another option: Khamzat Chimaev
However, Chimaev revealed in an interview that Chechen dictator Ramazan Kadryov offered an additional $2 million payment to Diaz in order to allow the original match-up to unfold. “Ramzan Akhmatovich called me and said he would give Nate $2 million to agree to the fight. I told Diaz, but he still refused. He didn’t want to fight me and just found another option.” Chimaev said.
Team Diaz quickly responded to his claim. Diaz’s representative Zach Rosenfield issued a statement to ESPN, denying anything like this ever occurred. “It is fun fiction for Khamzat,” the statement reads. “Just lacks a shred of truth, including what he was supposed to make. At what point in Khamzat’s fairy tale did he ask Nate? When he tapped out of his weight cut at 2 AM? When he was being held in isolation at the UFC PI so the story wouldn’t get out? The only millions that were negotiated on Friday were the millions more we got for fighting Tony after Khamzat was not professional enough to show up for the fight we asked for.”
