Beneil Dariush has revealed that he’s considering whether to move up to welterweight after his KO loss to Benoit Saint Denis at lightweight last month.
“That should have been the best performance of my life,” Dariush said on Submission Radio. “I was in incredible shape. Training was excellent. I had great sparring partners. My movement, my timing was great. Everything was great until fight week came.”
Unfortunately Dariush then struggled with cutting down to the 156lb limit, and things didn’t get any better from then on.
“I went to the weigh-ins and I missed weight. I apologized to my opponent. I tried to recover the best I could and go fight. I felt good and everything. The weight cut just got to me a little bit, obviously,” Dariush said.
“Even the fight day I felt good. I can’t make excuses, but for whatever reason — I don’t know if it’s the weight cut or what — but I wasn’t able to take a punch.”
That’s led Dariush to undergo tests to try to determine whether it’s safe for him to be fighting at 155lbs, or whether he’d be better served moving up to 170lbs instead.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘Maybe I’m going to move to 170.’ … I did some testing here and I did what’s called a DEXA scan. Basically I was at 185, 186 at 10% body fat. Which means I have like 19 pounds of fat to lose. Getting to zero is kind of dangerous — injuries become very common.
“I’m just going through the process to see if 155 is reasonable for me. I got the info from them and then I reached out to the UFC, so I’m going to go there this week and do some testing over there. Just to make sure.”
The 36-year-old Dariush is a talented fighter, so it’s understandable why he’s trying his best to prolong his career for as long as possible, but it’s hard to argue there’s not a strong case to suggest that his durability has just gone at this stage.
It’s worth bearing in mind that there were concerns about the quality of Dariush’s chin even back in 2017 when he suffered two KO losses in a 12 month period.
To his credit Dariush bounced back strongly after that, going on an eight-fight winning streak, to push close to title contention.
However, in 2023 Dariush then went on to suffer two bad 1st round KO losses in the space of seven months, and worse still it then emerged that he’d also been knocked out in training as well as suffering other knockdowns, leading to an 18-month layoff.
When he returned in the summer of this year against Renato Moicano he was acknowledging that another loss could signal the end of his career, and things didn’t look good in the first round when he was dropped, but he managed to recover and win by decision.
Being KO’d in just 16 seconds by BSD in November was a major red flag though, and so for his own health he really needs to think carefully about what he wants to do next, and whether it’s worth the risk to fight again.
