Umar Nurmagomedov has revealed he suffered a broken arm at the tail-end of last year, but decided to accept a fight against current bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili at UFC 311 anyway.
“After I was in Dagestan, I punch my arm,” Nurmagomedov told Brett Okamoto in an ESPN interview. “I go to show the doctor and I show them. They did, like, not an MRI but when they check bone? An X-Ray? They did X-ray and they said, ‘You broke [your arm]’.
“You know after that, after 20 days I go again even when I was broken, I was running. I want to still be in shape, you know. Even that time I try run, try to do shadow boxing, try to be in shape. And after 20 days I go again, and it’s become much better.
“Even my punches and other things, I do grapple, I do wrestling class. Everything I can do. Then I called my manager Ali [Abdelaziz] and I said to him ‘hey, I want to fight’. He said ‘but we said we’re injured’ and I said ‘I told you, take this fight’.
“My manager and my brother said ‘are you crazy? You can’t fight like that’ and they said no. They asked again, they called me again ‘will you fight with Merab?’ Of course, I already called with Ali and said make it happen. I want to fight in Ramadan, if Merab wants to fight in Ramadan I want to be active.”
It’s interesting to note that this video interview was first posted a few days ago, only to then quickly be taken back offline.
There was some concerns that perhaps Nurmagomedov mentioning such a significant injury so close to the fight on January 18th could be the reason for that as it could put the fight in jeopardy, but the interview re-emerged earlier today and as things stand it seems that the title clash is still going ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgYGM3qImd0
