It was a tough night for Brazil’s Fighting Nerds and no one had it tougher than Caio Borralho, who lost an opportunity to fight for the middleweight title after getting stuck on the end of Nassourdine Imavov’s crisp counter-striking for five rounds.
Imavov just looked more prepared to take a calculated and methodical decision in front of his home crowd. Perhaps that had to do with Borralho’s training camp being interrupted by an extra weight cut to play backup for Chimaev vs. du Plessis at UFC 319.
Occasional training partner Sean Strickland certainly seemed to think so.
“Caio is my buddy but he’s an idiot,” Strickland wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “He trained with us and was useless. Me: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Caio: ‘I’m cutting, I’m an alternate.’ So you’re giving up 4 weeks of your camp cutting weight twice while having a fight coming up? Whoever told you to do that, please hit him.”
Interestingly enough, Imavov’s team claims they were the one who tricked Borralho into taking the backup role.
“If he comes to the cage and he’s not in top form, that’s his problem I’m not going to have pity,” Imavov told Full Send MMA leading up to the fight. “And there you go. On our part, yes of course, it was the fact we didn’t go to do the back-up. We know very well that it’s annoying.”
“First we were supposed to be the backup,” Imavov’s manager Yunes Ben said. “And when we said we don’t want to do it any more, we did it on purpose and we knew that his ego would take the fight and it would be a bad thing for him.”
That’s some smart maneuvering from Imavov and his team, but it’s easy to say all this after UFC 319 goes through without a hitch. Given the number of times Khamzat Chimaev has flamed out of fights, Borralho had a better chance than most backups to get catapulted into a title fight.
But there’s a lesson here for future fighters to learn: maybe don’t mess up your training camp for a title fight eliminator so you can play backup a few weeks earlier.
