Daniel Cormier has spent years playing the guy who would happily throw down with Brock Lesnar. He stood nose to nose with him in the UFC 226 octagon, the tension spilled over, and DC kept the idea of the fight alive more than once after that night. It made for great TV. Now his oldest training partner has pulled back the curtain, and I think the confession makes Cormier look better.
Cain Velasquez went on the Shawn Ryan Show and told a story about his own run-in with Lesnar. Velasquez is part of a very short list of men who beat Lesnar in the UFC, along with Alistair Overeem and Frank Mir, and he did it by ending Brock’s heavyweight title reign with a Round 1 TKO at UFC 121. You’d expect a guy with that on his résumé to wave off the threat. He didn’t.
“He’s a freak of an athlete. My coaches and I knew that we had the recipe, but I could see everyone else,” Velasquez said.
Then came the part that’s lighting up the AKA group chat. According to Velasquez, Cormier came to him later and admitted something he’d kept quiet back then. Velasquez relayed DC’s words this way: “Man, when you fought him, I didn’t tell you, but I was just like, I don’t want to be fighting that guy.”
The Fear Was the Correct Read
Let’s be honest about what Lesnar looked like in that era. He was a WWE monster who walked into the UFC and held the heavyweight belt until Velasquez took it. People in the sport tossed around the word freak as a compliment for guys who were fast for their size. Lesnar was the guy the word got invented for. Velasquez, who actually stood across from him, chose that exact word on a podcast years later. When the man who beat Brock still talks about him that way, a teammate getting nervous watching from the gym looks like plain good judgment.
The Velasquez quote also has a detail that’s easy to skim past. He said he “could see everyone else.” That’s a champion admitting the room around him was spooked, even while he and his coaches felt they had the formula. Cormier was apparently one of those people. That’s a very human thing to admit about a guy in your own camp.
And look at the timing. DC told Cain later. During camp, while his partner was preparing to fight the most physically terrifying heavyweight on the planet, Cormier kept his mouth shut. That reads to me like a good teammate. You don’t walk into the room and tell your guy that his opponent scares you to death. You hold pads, you push the pace in wrestling, and you save the confession for when the belt is safely in your friend’s possession.
So Was the UFC 226 Stuff Fake?
Some fans are going to grab this story and decide the UFC 226 face-off was all theater. I hate manufactured beef that collapses the second two guys get close. If DC had backed off at that face-off, I’d be first in line to roast him. He didn’t. He stood there and leaned into it.
The reservations Velasquez described came from years before that altercation, per the reporting by ClutchPoints. People change. Time in the cage changes your sense of what you can handle. The guy who watched Cain’s camp and wanted no part of Lesnar is allowed to become the guy who looks Lesnar in the eye and wants it. If anything, that arc is more fun than a fighter who claims he was never scared of anybody. Every fighter is scared of somebody, and the ones who pretend otherwise are usually the ones ducking.
What matters is what you do once the fear shows up. Cormier, by the account in this story, felt it, swallowed it, and later wanted the fight anyway. That’s the opposite of ducking.
The Door Is Shut Now
Here’s my one gripe with all of this. We never got the payoff. Lesnar’s UFC run went through losses to Velasquez at UFC 121 and Overeem at UFC 141, then one more fight in 2016 against Mark Hunt at UFC 200. Cormier kept floating the idea of a showdown, and it never happened. Big-money crossover fights are my weakness, and this one had every ingredient: a pro wrestling giant, a decorated amateur wrestler with a big mouth, and a real octagon confrontation to sell the posters.
That window has closed for good. Lesnar retired after losing to Oba Femi at WWE SummerSlam 2026, and he’s done with both MMA and wrestling. So the story Cain told on the Shawn Ryan Show is about as close as we’ll ever get to a Cormier vs. Lesnar fight: a private admission about the one heavyweight who made even the toughest guys at AKA quietly hope they’d never have to face him.
For my money, give DC credit for telling Cain the truth, and give Cain credit for being the one who walked in there and did it.
