Daniel Cormier has claimed that UFC middleweight champion Khamzat Chimaev is taking his next training camp so seriously that he’s actually put a bounty on himself to encourage his sparring partners to try to submit him.
“I have heard stories out of the Chimaev camp that Chimaev is training so hard and putting it on guys, elite-level guys, like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” Cormier revealed on his YouTube channel. “I have heard Khamzat Chimaev wants people to go so hard with him to try to beat him and submit him, he’s paying them. He doesn’t care. I’ve got some guys at my gym that know people there that are like, ‘This dude, if somebody can submit him, there’s, like, money.’
“The Saints got in trouble for Bountygate. Khamzat’s putting a bounty on himself to make guys give him all that they have. It’s different.”
Khamzat’s first title defense will be against Sean Strickland, who has claimed that he humbled the champion when they trained together years ago, but with ‘Borz’ claiming the opposite is true, DC isn’t sure who to believe.
“Obviously, we know that those guys were training together and at a point it looked like they might have been friends,” Cormier said. “But when I hear them talk about the training sessions and talk about the way they feel about each other, someone’s lying because guys, people were in the gym when the were training. Someone was getting their ass kicked. Sean says it was Khamzat, Khamzat said it was Sean. Sean’s saying, ‘Maybe I’ll pick the toughest guy and I’ll let him get in positions.’
“Somebody knows what happened in those training sessions. You can get a pretty good gauge as to what is going to happen in the fight after those training sessions, but neither one of these dudes are blinking an eye.”
What we do know is that MMA reporter ‘The Schmo’ claimed to have witnessed it first-hand during an interview with Strickland back then, which the fighter didn’t deny.
And meanwhile, DC isn’t convinced that Khamzat is the kind of fighter that would quit on himself in training.
“If I know Khamzat Chimaev—and I’ve met him and I know him pretty good—quitting does not seem like something Khamzat would do,” Cormier said. “It just doesn’t. And if the stories are to be believed of what I am hearing in this gym right now, Khamzat Chimaev is firing on all cylinders.“
That being said, given that Strickland is coming off an impressive win over the in-form Anthony Hernandez, DC knows not to underestimate his ability.
“If you watch Sean, he was, too, down in Houston. Against [Anthony] ‘Fluffy’ Hernandez, he looked like he was a world-beater going into that fight against Sean Strickland. Sean stops him with a nasty knee. It was crazy.”
