Fresh off a spectacular second-round KO win over Manuel Torres in front of his home crowd at UFC Baku last weekend, the pride of Azerbaijan, Rafael Fiziev, has a few things to get off his chest.

While the UFC lightweight star is a native of Azerbaijan, he wasn’t born or raised in the country. He was born in Korday, Kazakhstan, in 1993, and did most of his growing up in Kyrgyzstan. And for the longest time, he represented Kyrgyzstan. But that stopped being the case in 2021. Despite being a graduate of the Kyrgyzstan Police Academy and holding a law degree, his stay in the police service there was relatively brief. During a recent interview after his big win last Saturday, Ariel Helwani decided to ask Fiziev about it, and his answer was pointed.

“Not long time, bro,” the 14-5 UFC lightweight said. “A couple of months because I finished Police Academy. I’m going to work and see all of this bulls–t in the Kyrgyzstan police. I see nothing, zero justice, and 100% corruption. I said, ‘What the f–k? I don’t want to be here.’

“When I was studying, it was my dream to stay, against the Mafia, against the drug-dealers, against this bullsh-t. But when I finish academy, I came, I want to be in some position like where I can work, where I can protect, where I can be against the drug dealers or something. But they put in a back position, a sh-t position, where I don’t want to be.”

While he had already begun his MMA career by this point, he was still juggling between his police job and his combat journey. Despite representing the police force in multiple tournaments, he revealed that he was relegated to trivial tasks in the service. This drove him to consider that there was more to it than met the eye.

“I see the people who don’t study good, they just pay money to be in good position. But I am a smart guy, I learn good, I study good. I try to be a good officer, a smart officer. And because of corruption, because I have blue eyes and white skin, they don’t put me in good position,” he explained. “So I say okay okay, I don’t want to stay in bad position because of corruption and because I have different face, so I am going to finish with that and I am going to make my professional (MMA) career.

“This is a hard decision because five years I was studying, before this five years in school. I was dreaming about how I be how to be a police officer. So 10 year totally maybe, I was dreaming about I can be a police officer. and what I do actually, I stand in a bad position f—-g going and give a ticket to bad parkings. What the f–k, you know, and I and I say, ‘Okay, f–k it. I I’m going to leave it.’”

So while leaving the force might have been a difficult decision for Rafael Fiziev at the time, things have since worked out well for the 33-year-old. In 2015, after quitting his police job, the lightweight contender moved to Phuket, Thailand, to pursue Muay Thai and MMA full-time.

He initially trained at Phuket Top Team before switching to Tiger Muay Thai in 2017, where he later became a striking coach. And in 2019, at the age of 26, he made it into the UFC. Though he lost his first fight, he has since amassed a respectable 8-5 record in Dana White’s promotion.

However, the path to leaving Kyrgyzstan was much more difficult than leaving his police job.