Ilia Topuria Opens Up On Clever Use of Wine to Deal With Tough Times Before UFC Weigh ins

Weight cutting, in Sean O’Malley‘s words, “feels like you’re dying.”, which does seem true given what weight cutting involves. Fighters usually drain themselves by means of dehydration in the final week (since the human body is 60% water) and restrict any calorie intake to make weight. As you can imagine, that takes a toll on your organs, which themselves get dehydrated severely. As you can imagine, it is not a very pleasant experience.

But Ilia Topuria has found the perfect way to make the gruelling process of cutting weight actually pleasant—get drunk. “You’re the only guy I’ve ever seen that drinks like right before weigh ins, right. Like, on the ESPN episode, you were pretty drunk on red wine. What started that?” Mike Perry‘s OverDogs podcast co-host, Josh McLean, asked ‘La Leyenda’ in a recent interview.

The bombastic Spanish-Georgian superstar had a simple answer. “It’s tough to sleep before the weigh-ins, you know, because we’re cutting weight. But when you drink wine, you don’t give a f–k about anything because you get drunk,” Topuria beamingly told Perry and McLean.

Does this seem like a good idea? It is pretty hard to go to sleep when your body thinks it’s dying of thirst. So drinking wine to calm down your body and trick it into thinking you’re actually happy (or less miserable) might just be a genius idea to make weight-cutting bearable. But in good news for ‘La Leyenda’, weight cutting would be a lot more bearable for Topuria anyway as he has moved up to lightweight.

UFC legend thinks Khabib Nurmagomedov vetoed Islam Makhachev vs. Ilia Topuria

Ilia Topuria feels stiffed by the UFC and Islam Makhachev. ‘La Leyenda’ told reporters at a press conference in Spain that “the UFC promised me I’d fight for the belt. That’s why I vacated it. And they’ve always kept their promise.” But since the Dagestani champ has flatly refused to fight the as-of-yet featherweight champ, Topuria feels hard done by.

Makachev, of course, wants the Spanish national to prove himself first by facing another top contender. But Henry Cejudo feels that it isn’t actually Makhachev who is against the idea of fighting Topuria, but the lightweight champ’s mentor Khabib Nurmagomedov, who doesn’t want the fight to happen. Recalling an interaction with ‘The Eagle’ on his Pound 4 Pound podcast, the former two-division champion explained Nurmagomedov’s opposition to Makhachev-Topuria.

“I remember talking to Khabib, and Khabib said this: ‘It’s not fair for Ilia to skip the line and go after the title shot with Islam because that’s all Islam’s been doing. He gave Volkanovski two title shots. I don’t even think it’s gonna be Islam’s choice. I think Khabib’s gonna step in and be like, ‘He needs to fight the number one contender,” Cejudo said in a recent interview.

What do you think? Does Ilia Topuria deserve to fight for the 155-lb title, given his domination at featherweight? Is ‘The Eagle’ right to have Islam Makhachev deny the Spanish-Georgian a shot at double-champ greatness? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.