Fedor Emelianenko has answered Dana White, and according to an NDTV Sports headline published Thursday, the answer was brutal.
Right now that headline is the whole story. The specifics haven’t surfaced in anything we can verify: what White said, where he said it, and the exact words Fedor used to hit back. So you won’t find a Fedor quote in this piece. If we can’t print it word for word, we don’t print it. When the full exchange is on the record, we’ll run it.
What we can confirm is that White’s week already had a Russian heavyweight problem before Fedor got involved.
View post on X
Alexander Volkov told Ariel Helwani on Wednesday that he showed up to the UFC 333 press conference uninvited, after again being left off the dais. “I saw they didn’t have me on the press conference again, the same as the last three fights. I don’t know why,” Volkov said. He explained that he came in through the regular gates like any ticket holder because he had questions for the fighters and for White.
Volkov is convinced White had no idea who was asking. “Of course he didn’t recognize me... I’m not even sure he can remember my name, and I bet every time he hears my name, he thinks they’re talking about Alexander Volkanovski,” he told Helwani.
That joke landed harder because of who owned the weekend. Volkanovski defended his featherweight title at UFC 333 with a second-round stoppage of Movsar Evloev, then started lobbying for a superfight with lightweight champion Justin Gaethje. White said afterward it would be hard to deny Volkanovski many of his requests. So one Alexander gets his wish list considered at the presser, and the other Alexander has to sneak in to ask a question.
Volkov dropped the bit long enough to make his actual point. “But to talk seriously, he still didn’t have an answer to my question. I’m asking, what should I do? What am I supposed to do to get a title fight? And they don’t have an answer.”
View post on X
White has also spent the week defending a decision fighters have been ripping. Islam Makhachev passed on a fight with Carlos Prates at UFC 336, so the UFC is putting an interim welterweight belt on Prates vs. Michael Morales in January. White insisted the division had to move forward. Matt Brown, speaking on The Fighter vs. The Writer, wasn’t buying it. “Is that the UFC trying to punch Islam in the gut?” Brown said. “That’s what it feels like here.”
My take: two Russian heavyweights took shots at the UFC boss in the span of a couple days, and the one we can actually quote asked the best question of fight week. A top contender shouldn’t have to walk through the fan entrance to find out what it takes to get a title shot. As for Fedor, I want to see the actual words before I crown anybody the winner of this round. A brutal response deserves to be read in full, and right now all anyone has is a headline. Volkov, meanwhile, is still waiting on his answer.
