In the run-up to his UFC 254 contest against Justin Gaethje in 2020, former UFC lightweight champion and GOAT contender Khabib Nurmagomedov lost his father due to Covid. While this would be enough for most fighters to call off the bout, it wasn’t so for ‘The Eagle’.

Although it was definitely the most heartbreaking, this was not the only adversity he faced during camp for UFC 254 that almost led to the fight being canceled. Nurmagomedov’s coach, Javier Mendez in an interview with ‘London Real’ talked about how disastrous the camp for ‘The Eagle’s last fight was.

Coach on Khabib Nurmagomedov’s disastrous UFC 254 camp

Javier Mendez called the UFC 254 camp “the worst camp in the history of Khabib camps,” where everything that could go wrong “went wrong”. Mendez recalled Khabib Nurmagomedov coming into the gym prior to the bout wearing a mask.

Since this was the time when Covid was rampant, Mendez feared the Dagestani had contracted Covid but it turned out that he had contracted the mumps, a viral illness. While the mumps cleared up a couple of days later, Nurmagomedov reentered the gym soon after.

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“He had the mumps. His chin was all like this (swollen) and I’m like ‘Oh, crap, how are we gonna go fight, you got the mumps, when can you train?’ [Khabib said] ‘I don’t know coach, give me a couple of days, I’ll be good to go’. We train a couple of days and he gets it again,” he said.

Mendez sensibly wanted to cancel the fight, but was refused by Nurmagomedov, who asked him to wait for a few more days before taking the decision, to which the coach agreed.

“So I’m trying to convince him to cancel the fight… He goes ‘no, no coach, give me time, if I don’t do this by this time, then you can pull the plug. I go ‘okay, fine’. But the time comes he does fantastic and I’m like ‘okay, we can fight,'” he added.

And while the Dagestani did indeed manage to recover over the next few days and everything seemed to be getting back on track, the former champion broke his toe. This time, of course, Mendez was much more adamant that the fight should have been canceled, but Nurmagomedov again suggested they take that decision later.

“Next he breaks his toe. I’m like ‘for sure cancel the fight.’ Again, ‘no, please coach let me go if I don’t show you improvement by this time, I promise I will push back the fight,'” Mendez added. Nurmagomedov went on to recover and fight and defeat Gaethje at their UFC 254 bout despite all of these setbacks, which is probably one of the reasons why Mendez called him the ‘most dangerous’ fighter in the world.

Mendez disagrees with ‘DC’ calling Makhachev more dangerous than ‘The Eagle’

Former UFC champion and Khabib Nurmagomedov and Islam Makahchev’s former AKA gym alumni Daniel Cormier said in a recent interview that since Makhachev possessed a similar ground game to ‘The Eagle’ but was a better striker than ‘The Eagle’, he felt that he was “even more dangerous than Khabib was during his prime.”

On being asked his thoughts on the subject, Mendez firmly disagreed with his former student on the topic of Makhachev being more dangerous than Nurmagomedov. He admitted that while Makhachev may be more skilled than the former champion, the latter was the most dangerous fighter in his prime. “He’s more skilled in multiple areas. More dangerous? Nobody is more dangerous, in my opinion, in the world than Khabib. No one,” he said. What do you think about Mendez’s comments?

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