Henry Cejudo has a gift for saying the one sentence that guarantees his name trends for 48 hours. This week’s entry came via a clip posted by the Pound 4 Pound show’s account and shared on X by Dovy: “People who can’t make it in wrestling do sambo.”
Six words of the clip get the attention. The longer version tells you more. Bloody Elbow ran a fuller quote, which it credited to the Double Coverage Podcast, and in it Cejudo named names: “People who do Sambo, they can’t wrestle, they can’t make it in wrestling, like Khabib and all these dudes, like I love them but I know wrestling is king in Dagestan, if you can’t make it in wrestling they go to Sambo.” He added, “There’s a handicap and there’s a Gi and not everybody is as athletic as they are in wrestling.”
So the target is Khabib Nurmagomedov, who retired from MMA at 29-0. I think Cejudo is half right about the hierarchy and completely wrong about what it proves.
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The part he gets right
Cejudo knows wrestling at a level very few people in this sport ever will. He’s an Olympic gold medalist, one of four to compete in the UFC, and he and Kayla Harrison are the only two to win both Olympic gold and a UFC title. He went further than Harrison by holding two UFC belts at once. When a guy with that résumé says wrestling is the prestige track in Dagestan, I’m inclined to believe him. Every sport has a ladder, and a kid who doesn’t climb to the top rung of the most prestigious one will look for another.
That’s where the useful observation ends.
The part that falls apart
If sambo is where the wrestling also-rans end up, then the also-ran built the most dominant run in the history of the lightweight division. Bloody Elbow credits Khabib as the first fighter to bring that smothering Dagestani wrestling style to the UFC, the style Islam Makhachev and others have carried forward since. Whatever happened on the freestyle mats when those men were teenagers, the version of grappling they took into the cage beat everybody. The gi, the handicap, the ruleset Cejudo sneers at, all of it produced fighters who pin world-class athletes against a fence and drown them.
MMA rewards the guy who can blend things. Nobody gets a medal for having the purest freestyle pedigree once the cage door shuts. Cejudo knows this better than most, because his whole late-career brand has been hopping rulesets. He made his pro boxing debut in September. He’s been competing in Real American Freestyle Wrestling, where he and Merab Dvalishvili are 1-1 after Merab won a decision in July and Cejudo evened it up more recently. By the logic he’s applying to sambo players, a former UFC champion who goes boxing after his MMA career ends must have washed out of MMA. Payton Talbott did send him into retirement for the second time, after all. I don’t believe that, and I doubt Cejudo does either.
He conceded the point himself
The detail that sinks the whole take is buried in the same interview. According to Bloody Elbow, Cejudo admitted he likely wouldn’t be able to hang with those Dagestani wrestlers in RAF competition, chalking it up to years of focusing on MMA instead of the mats. Read that next to the main quote. The men who supposedly couldn’t make it in wrestling are, by his own estimate, too good for him to wrestle right now. Either the sambo crowd can wrestle, or Cejudo’s MMA years cost him more than he’d like to say out loud. Both can be true. Neither helps his argument.
There’s also a pattern worth naming. Bloody Elbow pointed out this isn’t the first time he’s taken a shot at Khabib, and he already stirred things up by ranking himself above the Eagle in the GOAT debate. Cejudo is 39, his fighting career is over, and he’s building a second act out of exhibitions, trilogy talk with Dvalishvili and boxing ambitions. Picking a fight with the most respected unbeaten record in the sport is a pretty efficient way to keep people talking about you. It’s also a lot easier than finding a fight with Khabib that will ever happen.
To be fair to Henry, he’s sharp when he wants to be. On the same weekend all this was circulating, he was live-tweeting UFC Edmonton and correctly noted Mike Malott was fighting intelligently and using his kicks to take Round 1 against Joaquin Buckley, right before Malott ended it with a knee at 2:32 of Round 2. That guy, the analyst, sees the sport clearly. The guy on the podcast mic is selling something.
Wrestling may well be king in Dagestan. Sambo still built a 29-0 heir to the throne, and the only person in this story who has admitted he can’t currently handle those men on the mats is Henry Cejudo. If he really wants to prove the gi crowd is a step down, the Dvalishvili trilogy is sitting right there, and I’d bet the Dagestani guys will be watching.
