After recovering from a recent illness that forced him out of a fight with Robert Whittaker on short notice, Khamzat Chimaev is now looking forward to getting back in the Octagon later this year, and he appears to now have his heart set on getting an immediate title shot.
“Most likely [my return will happen] in October in Abu Dhabi,” Chimaev told Match TV. “[The opponent is] unknown so far. I would like to fight for the title.
“I have seven fights, seven victories. There is no fighter in the UFC who has won seven fights without fighting for the belt.”
Chimaev certainly has an impressive CV and the star power to justify a title shot, but it’s perhaps not as cut-and-dried as his statement makes it seem.
For one thing his claim is factually incorrect given that Khabib Nurmagomedov didn’t get a title shot until he’d won nine fights in a row, Islam Makachev had to put together a 10-fight winning streak, and Tony Ferguson had nine wins before he got a chance to fight for the interim belt, and eventually extended that run to 12 wins without ever fighting for the undisputed title.
On top of that, Chimaev has actually only won three of his seven UFC wins at 185lbs, in addition to one win at a 180lb catchweight. That, along with the fact that he’s now heading towards having had just one fight in the last two years means he’s only currently ranked No.11 in the middleweight division at this time.
And given his troubles with ill-heath in recent times, which has seen him hospitalized on multiple occasions, the UFC may want him to get another fight or two first before giving him a chance to potentially become champion to prove that he’s healthy enough to compete on a regular basis and won’t just hold up the division.
With all that being said though, the UFC does like to put on blockbuster fights, even if it doesn’t always make sense from a rankings perspective, and Chimaev against the winner of August’s UFC 305’s Dricus du Plessis vs. Israel Adesanya title showdown would fit the bill, so you never know what might happen.
