Andrei Arlovski has faced cancer three separate times, and now he’s talking about it. In a personal statement dated October 20, the heavyweight reflected on all three of those battles and on how cancer treatment and fighting have run alongside each other in his life, MiddleEasy reported on October 27.
The details out there right now are thin. MiddleEasy’s report centers the statement on two subjects, his treatment and his fighting, and it confirms the count: three distinct battles with the disease. The specifics haven’t surfaced in the reporting so far. We don’t know the types of cancer, when each diagnosis came, or how treatment lined up with his fight schedule. I’m not going to fill those gaps with guesses. When a fighter decides to share something this personal, he gets to set the terms, and the rest of us can wait for his own words to circulate in full.
What we do know is the size of the career he built while carrying all of this. Arlovski’s name came up just days before the statement hit the news cycle, and it came up in a record book. At UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi on October 24, Alexander Volkov (41-11 MMA, 15-5 UFC) beat Rizvan Kuniev (15-4-1 MMA, 2-2 UFC) for his 15th win in UFC heavyweight competition. That moved Volkov into a tie for fourth-most in divisional history, according to MMA Junkie’s post-event facts published on Yahoo Sports.
Look at who sits above him. Frank Mir is third with 16. Derrick Lewis is second with 20. Arlovski is first with 23, a full three clear of Lewis and eight clear of Volkov, who’s still active and still stacking wins. The heaviest division in the sport chews through bodies, and very few men stick around long enough to rack up 23 wins in it. Every one of those wins meant a full camp, a weigh-in, a walk to the cage and 15 minutes or less against someone trying to separate him from consciousness.
Knowing that cancer was part of his life across three separate fights with the disease changes how those numbers read. MiddleEasy’s report doesn’t mention a next fight, a retirement or any change to his status, so there’s nothing on the schedule to point to yet.
My take: I’ve watched Arlovski’s name sit at the top of that heavyweight wins list for so long that I stopped thinking about what it cost. This statement puts a price on it nobody outside his circle could see. Volkov needs eight more heavyweight wins to catch him, and every time a broadcast flashes that graphic from now on, I’ll be thinking about the three fights that never made his record.
