Alexander Volkanovski has spoken out about the two brutal KO losses against Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria that forced him to take a year out from the sport in 2024.
Unusually, Volkanovski recalls enough of his head kick knockout loss to Makhachev in October of 2023 to describe in disturbing detail how it felt in the moment.
“A shin to the dome like that, that’s proper contact to the brain,” Volkanovski said on the Unscripted show. “That’s trauma to the brain, direct brain trauma. It sounds terrible when I say it like that, but you get what I mean. You hit the chin and it rattles. This was bang and, like, direct contact. … I remember hearing it was like ‘chzoooooo’ and everything’s just going all over the place. I was like, ‘Noooo,’ I knew what’s happening, literally that’s how it looked like.
“It looked like I was cross-eyed because everything was just everywhere and weird noises, but I was sort of there in a sense like, ‘No,’ like I knew what happened. ‘Try and get yourself back together, defend yourself.’ I couldn’t defend myself my hands just wouldn’t do what I wanted.”
Rather than take an extended break to let his brain heal after that tough defeat, Volkanovski instead pushed to get back into the Octagon sooner rather than later, accepting an ill-fated featherweight title defense against Ilia Topuria.
“You’ve seen this footage of me sort of breaking down and not knowing what I’m—If I’m like this now, how am I going to be after the sport’s done?” Volkanovski said. “That’s what I was worried about. Then I was like I need to keep busy. Told the UFC I want to fight. I end up fighting just after three months later with a bad concussion. Most people have six months, no head contact, and then start camp. I started training, when you’re training you’re starting head contact pretty quickly.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Volkanovski now admits was a big mistake, and it left him vulnerable to being finished even worse than the last time.
“I go in too early and I get knocked out, I lose my belt,” Volkanovski said. “That’s the fact and that’s what happened. I’m not taking anything away from Ilia. I’m just saying that that’s what can happen. So I got a crazy shin to the noggin and obviously Ilia can hit hard, we’ve seen that, but I mean, I’ve never been just completely lights out like that. I was lights out for a couple of minutes.
“He got me in the cheek. But as soon there was one good connection: snoring.”
Thankfully there was a happy ending to this story though, as after taking over a year out to recover Volkanovski returned in style back in April by beating Diego Lopes on the scorecards to reclaim the vacant featherweight title.
Watch Volkanovski’s full extended interview below.
