Cain Velasquez spent his prime at American Kickboxing Academy as the heavyweight nobody wanted to see across the mat, which is why his newest story about Islam Makhachev hits a little differently. On the Shawn Ryan Show, the two-time UFC heavyweight champion said he could tell Makhachev was rare back when the Dagestani was still coming up and the two were trading in light sparring sessions.
According to Velasquez, Makhachev kept catching him with shots he didn’t see coming, which he said was something that simply didn’t happen to him. “Nobody hits me with stuff,” Velasquez said, before recalling what went through his head in the moment: “Where the f*ck did that come from? This guy’s good.”
Velasquez called Makhachev “one of my teammates, one of Khabib’s guys,” a nod to the mentor who brought him into that room, Khabib Nurmagomedov. Asked about the best fighters competing today, Makhachev was the first name out of his mouth. He described him as “f*cking good everywhere.” MMA Fighting first reported the comments.
The resume backs him up. Makhachev is 29-1, holds the UFC record for most title defenses at 155 pounds and now reigns as the promotion’s welterweight champion. He also sits at No. 1 in MMA Fighting’s pound-for-pound rankings.
Velasquez’s own story has gone somewhere much darker. He was widely considered the best heavyweight on the planet in the early 2010s, though injuries kept chipping away at his career until he retired in 2019. In 2011 he headlined the UFC’s first event on Fox against Junior dos Santos, a card that marked one of the company’s big turns toward the mainstream. In February 2022 he was arrested after a high-speed chase in California and charged with attempted murder for shooting at Harry Goularte, a man who allegedly molested Velasquez’s son. He was released from prison this past February and is currently on parole.
Velasquez admitted he doesn’t follow the sport the way he used to, but he said he’s aware of how far it has come, from that Fox debut to a UFC that now runs events nearly every week on Paramount+. He believes the athletes keep improving, saying “guys have gotten so polished, so good everywhere,” and he credited MMA and the UFC with pushing more kids into wrestling and jiu-jitsu. “Girls wrestling in college is one of the fastest growing sports in the world,” he said.
The detail I keep coming back to is the word light. Velasquez was a heavyweight champion, and Makhachev built his legacy at 155, so these were never fair fights and nobody in that gym pretended otherwise. Light sparring between a lightweight and a heavyweight is usually where the bigger man works on his reads and the smaller man survives. That a young Makhachev was the one finding openings, against a guy who built a career on not getting touched, says plenty about what was being built in that AKA room long before the belts. Velasquez saw it from the inside, years before the rest of us had the record books to prove it.
