Back in 2014, Bellator MMA president Scott Coker received a phone call from a long-time MMA manager, Bob Cook, who did not beat around the bush.“I’ve got him,” Cook said, “I’ve got the next kid.” He has a history of finding hidden talent, and found many, including a certain heavyweight named Daniel Cormier back in 2009, and he was sure he had found his next star. Cook had found 17-year-old Aaron Pico —a Golden Gloves boxing champ at 13 and one of the greatest prospects in the history of MMA. 

“From everything I’ve seen and heard, Aaron Pico may be the greatest prospect in the history of MMA,” Scott Coker said in 2017  before Pico’s debut at Bellator NYC in 2017. However, all the talk about him being a prodigy died once his debut fight against Zach Freeman was a failure, as the latter submitted him via a guillotine choke. However, the 28-year-old redeemed himself with 13 wins after that, and now he is set to make his debut in Dana White‘s promotion in July 2025. But what has he been up to? How is he training? Josh Thomson answered the most pressing questions in our minds.

Josh Thomson explored all about Aaron Pico in the new Weighing In podcast and said, “ He’s got all the tools and the weapons. He’s just got to fight smart. He’s got punching power. His focus is on a very Dagestani type of lifestyle that he lives. He writes horses with his kid. He likes pump tracks and dirt bike stuff with his kid. His boy is his life. His focus is literally like his horses  first is his son, then it’s his horses, and then fighting, that’s his life.”

He does own a horse named Canelo and expressed his love for horses through Instagram. But most of all, he loves his son Rylee Pico and spends a lot of time with him. It’s very similar to how Islam Makhachev loves to spend his time— with his farm animals. He is a full-time fighter but a part-time farmer and loves his horses and more than 1000 animals. Makhachev happily spoke about his lifestyle before UFC 311 to UFC.com. Interestingly, Pico not only has a Dagestani lifestyle but also went to the country!

Aaron Pico’s connection to Dagestan

The California native has redeemed himself and not been beaten by anyone except an unfortunate injury loss to Jeremy Kennedy. He has fought 10 times in the past five years and won 9 of them. The former Olympic hopeful revealed that his wrestling is good enough to beat anyone in UFC, including the Dagestanis. 

“The reason why, like I’m not like, you know– Dagestan has incredible wrestlers, like, I mean the highest highest level. But what a lot of fans and people don’t know about me, ‘cuz they just don’t know, is that I spent a lot of time in Dagestan wrestling from like 16 to like 19. I was in Makhachkala, Khasvyrut, Ossetia, which is, it’s still in the Caucasus mountains… but yeah, I wrestled a lot there so I got to see the highest level,” Pico divulged to Kamaru Usman and Henry Cejudo on the Pound 4 Pound podcast.

The experience in Dagestan is already going to work wonders for him in the UFC since it helped him become a world championship-level wrestler. He is so confident that he made some pretty remarkable additions, saying, “I mean, Islam and Khabib are great wrestlers, like they are, like, you know, MMA wrestling. But where they come from, people don’t realize where they come from; they’re not at the highest level at all. Like, I’m talking like the Abdul Rashids, the [Abdulsalam] Gadisovs, the best wrestlers. Like they’re not even in the top maybe top 30 and top 50, like, where they come from in Dagestan and the Caucasus Mountains.”

Now that he is about to debut in UFC against Movsar Evloev, we’ll see how Dagestani wrestling helped his style. Tell us what you think in the comments below.