In the lead up to Merab Dvalishvili’s bantamweight title defense against Umar Nurmagomedov at UFC 311 last weekend, the champion had hinted at a leg injury he’d been battling with during his training camp and now the full extent of his ailments has been revealed.
Dvalishvili’s head coach John Wood revealed how the star suffered cuts to his leg that eventually became badly infected with staph, while later in his camp he also had to deal with a pinched nerve in his back that left him unable to walk for a week.
“He got his leg cut up on our bleachers,” Wood told Submission Radio. “He was walking by the bleachers and literally – you’ll see the pictures come out I’m sure in the next few days – but cuts all over. He left it, kept training through it, eventually got it stitched up too late, and then stitches busted, and then he restitched it, and then just his whole shin became infected. It was a concern of even getting cleared for this fight. The infection, like the staph infection was gone, but the skin we were really afraid of to the point where we got the commission to approve getting it wrapped, that he was going to do the Luke Rockhold thing.
“But Merab’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to show any kind of weakness. I don’t care. It’s fine. If it breaks open, it breaks open.’ So we had that, and basically he couldn’t use that leg for the entire camp.
“Then dealing with being on antibiotics and all that kind of sh*t, and then his back. He said it the other day. UFC ‘Embedded’ came by or ‘Countdown,’ and he was out doing his workout in the street and he jumped up the wrong way and then pinched nerve, pinched the vertebrae and couldn’t walk for a week. So I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ So it was a complicated camp.”
Dvalishvili has also spoken out about the situation, and revealed that the cuts were only finally starting to heal properly during fight week, which left him worrying that the commission wouldn’t let him fight.
“I was doing cardio training on the stairs and I hit the stairs with my shin,” Dvalishvili said on The Ariel Helwani show.
“The cut was still open and it was taking so long to heal up and it finally closed now in fight week. I was worried the commission was not going to let me fight. I was doing everything, putting creams every day, doing massage, and all the therapies, and actually California has a very strict commission. They check everything, my body, and Thursday I had pants on and the commission asked me to show him my leg, my shin. I lifted my left leg pants and showed him the chin and he kept talking, the second time he asked me to show him my other leg, I showed again left leg and he didn’t know there was a cut.
“Who knows? Maybe I can pass. But I was worried. It looks fresh, but it’s been a longtime cut.”
In the end Dvalishvili was able to compete, and despite all the issues with his training camp he somehow still showcased his remarkable cardio to outwork Nurmagomedov over five rounds and emerge with a unanimous decision victory.
“He knows how to lock in the day of the fight,” Wood said of Dvalishvili. “Everything changes and you can just see the weight cut. Once the weight cut is done, he’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a blast.’ He just switches into, ‘I am going to go out there, fight my ass off and have fun.’
“Once I saw that in the morning for the shakeout, I was like, ‘Oh man, it’s going to be a great night.’”
