Khamzat Chimaev will fight Robert Whittaker in the co-main event of UFC 308 this weekend in Abu Dhabi, but the middleweight match-up was originally scheduled to take place in June before he was hospitalized by a mysterious illness.
Now Chimaev has spoken out about that traumatic time, and even now it seems he’s unclear as to what exactly caused him to be what Dana White described at the time as “violently ill.”
“We was in training camp, the first month was very good,” Chimaev says on the UFC 308 Countdown show.
“The last three weeks, my immunity goes down. I don’t know what happened. All the guys ate the same food [but] only me got sick.
“I was in the hospital for a couple of days. I came out and started training again and the same s*** happened again. The doctor said to me, ‘You need to just be off from the gym and not training, not doing nothing.’
“I went home to the mountains.”
This isn’t the first time that Chimaev has been struck down by illness as in late 2020 he got Covid and had a protracted battle with it, leading to a fight being cancelled and at one stage the star fearing that his career might be over after coughing up blood.
Chimaev eventually recovered from that and has won several fights since, but he’s still struggled with ill-health at times, so he’ll be hoping he can make a big statement against Whittaker on Saturday night to prove he’s back to his best.
