Las Vegas isn’t big enough for both Magomed Ankalaev and Alex Pereira.
The two light heavyweights are set to fight each other again at UFC 320 on October 4th, and hopefully a fistfight doesn’t break out over the next week as the two are both at the Performance Institute training.
Recently, Pereira claimed that Ankalaev was hiding from him in the PI, suggesting the light heavyweight champ was always down to trash talk on the internet but silent in real life. That crossed a line for “Big Ank,” who apparently
believes constant shots referring to his opponent’s past alcohol issues are okay, but ‘lying’ is not.
“Honestly, up until recently, I had respect for him as a fighter and as a person,” Ankalaev said (via MMA Junkie). “I no longer respect him. Okay, trash talk is something to hype up the fight, maybe you say something funny, or to be salty, but when you lie to people and say, ‘I saw him, and he hid,’ and stuff like that, I don’t respect people like that. Why would you lie about something that never happened?”
This led to Ankalaev confronting Pereira at the Performance Institute, where they had the slowest, saddest argument through Google Translate. “Poatan” plans on releasing the full video of the incident on his YouTube. As for how Ankalaev saw it?
“The problem here is that he was talking all this crap just a few days ago,” Ankalaev said. “And then today I saw him, it was just me and my coach and him and his whole team. I approached him and I said, ‘Hey, guys. You were lying that I was hiding and stuff. I’m right here right now. What are you going to do?’ He responded by saying, ‘Oh, this girl said that, this guy said that,’ and he started making stuff up on the spot.”
We’ll see what the video shows soon enough, but Ankalaev made it clear that he’ll punch Pereira in the face if the two run into each other again and he feels like the former champion is attempting to bully him.
“I have no problem,” he claimed. “But say he gets close to me next week and decides to get too close to me, of course, I’m going to defend myself.”
