Henry Cejudo has a gift for saying the loudest possible thing in the fewest possible words, and his latest one landed on the man who retired at 29-0. Speaking on the Double Coverage Podcast, as Bloody Elbow reported, Cejudo explained Khabib Nurmagomedov’s path into Combat Sambo as a kind of demotion, the place Dagestani athletes go when the wrestling room spits them out.
“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,” Cejudo said.
He kept going. “There’s a handicap and there’s a Gi and not everybody is as athletic as they are in wrestling.”
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I’ve read that second quote a dozen times now, and every time it sounds less like an insult and more like an accidental description of why Sambo made sense for a man who was always headed for a cage.
The question Cejudo skipped
Cejudo is framing this as a single ladder. Freestyle sits on top, everything else is a lower rung, and anyone who ends up somewhere else must have slipped. That’s how a lot of American wrestling people see the world, and in fairness, Cejudo climbed that ladder as high as anyone ever has.
But the measure of Khabib’s training was never going to be a freestyle podium. It was what he did once the gloves went on. And what he did, by Bloody Elbow’s own description, was become the first fighter to bring Dagestani wrestling into the UFC in its fully dominant form, a style that has spread over the last few years through Islam Makhachev and others. He went 29 fights without a loss and left behind a lineage that kept producing champions after he walked away.
If Sambo was the consolation prize, it’s the most productive consolation prize in the history of the sport.
This is the part of Dagestani gym culture that gets flattened every time someone turns it into a podcast clip. A room that develops fighters is choosing what to build. Grips on a jacket, takedowns that end in control rather than points, a ruleset where you have to think about what happens after you land on top. Those habits are the exact ones Khabib carried into the Octagon, where opponents spent rounds pinned against the fence with nowhere to go. You can call that a handicap. I’d call it a curriculum aimed squarely at mixed martial arts, run by people who seemed to understand the destination long before the rest of us did.
The best case for Cejudo
The strongest version of his argument goes like this: he’s earned the right to talk. Cejudo is one of just four Olympic gold medalists to compete in the UFC, and he and Kayla Harrison are the only two to also win a UFC title. Cejudo went further and became a double champion. When a man with that résumé says someone couldn’t cut it in wrestling, you should probably listen.
Except his credentials answer a different question. Cejudo knows better than almost anyone what it takes to win at the top of freestyle. That tells you nothing about why a Dagestani kid’s path bent toward Sambo, and nothing about whether that bend was a failure or a decision. Cejudo didn’t offer evidence of Khabib washing out of anything. He offered a generalization about “all these dudes,” which is a strange thing to say about the most respected wrestling culture in the sport while insisting you love them.
And then, by Bloody Elbow’s account, he undercut himself. In the same conversation, Cejudo admitted he likely couldn’t hang with Dagestani wrestlers in Real American Freestyle competition, citing all the years he’d spent focused on MMA. So the guys who supposedly couldn’t make it in wrestling are, by his own estimate, guys he wouldn’t want to wrestle right now. That’s a tough position to argue from.
Why this keeps happening
This isn’t the first time Cejudo has gone after Khabib. He’s already ranked himself above the Russian in the GOAT debate, which drew plenty of heat, and this feels like the same project wearing a singlet. Since leaving the UFC, Cejudo has stayed busy across rulesets. He’s been competing in RAF, where he and Merab Dvalishvili are 1-1. Merab won the first match by decision in July, and Cejudo got his win back on the mats more recently. He also made his pro boxing debut in September and has talked about a takeover of that sport too. The man at 39 is out there doing things, and I respect it.
But moving between disciplines is precisely what he’s mocking Khabib for. Cejudo picked up new rulesets because he wanted new tests. He’d bristle if anyone said he went to boxing because he couldn’t make it in MMA. The Dagestani version of that same instinct deserves the same courtesy, especially when the results are sitting right there in the record book.
Wrestling may well be king in Dagestan, as Cejudo said. Kings also train their heirs for the specific fight in front of them. The fight Khabib was built for ended 29-0, and the next generation from those same rooms is still winning it.
Cejudo’s next move, if he gets it, is a trilogy match with Dvalishvili. If he wants to settle what Dagestani-style training is worth, the record book is a better place to start than a podcast mic.
