Henry Cejudo has an Olympic gold medal, and that buys a man a lot of time in front of a microphone. He and Kayla Harrison are the only two people to win Olympic gold and a UFC title, and Cejudo went further and held two UFC belts. When he talks about wrestling, I listen. This week on the Double Coverage Podcast, though, he told a story about Dagestan that sounds tidy and gets the important part wrong.
“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. Then he added: “There’s a handicap and there’s a Gi and not everybody is as athletic as they are in wrestling.”
So in Cejudo’s version, Sambo is the consolation bracket, the room where the kids who got cut from the real team end up. Follow that logic to the cage and it gets strange fast. The consolation bracket produced Khabib Nurmagomedov, who retired at 29-0 without a single blemish. Bloody Elbow, which first wrote up Cejudo’s comments, credits Khabib as the first fighter to bring that suffocating Dagestani style to the UFC, a style that has only spread since, with Islam Makhachev and others carrying it forward. If that’s what the leftovers look like, I’d hate to see the varsity.
View post on X
The blend is the point
Cejudo is reading Dagestan through the only lens that ever mattered to him, which is freestyle wrestling as an end in itself, scored on a mat, judged against the best in the world. That lens made him great. It also leaves out what the Dagestani style actually is once it walks into a cage.
What Khabib brought to the UFC was a hybrid. A freestyle base, yes, with the hips and the chain wrestling and the conditioning that region is famous for. Layered onto it was everything Sambo teaches that freestyle never will: control through the jacket, the trips and off-balances that come from gripping cloth, and in Combat Sambo, the experience of grappling while someone is trying to hit you. Cejudo calls the jacket a handicap. For a cage fighter it’s a second education. A grappler who has learned to steer a body through fabric and also through sweat has two ways to hold you down, and Khabib’s opponents spent 29 fights finding out how few ways there were to get back up.
Nobody stumbles into a system that repeatable. You don’t get one fighter, then a training partner, then a whole lineage running the same suffocating pattern on elite opposition by accident. Somebody in those gyms decided that the wrestling room alone wasn’t enough preparation for a fight with strikes in it, and built around that conviction. The coaches who did that work rarely get their names in headlines. Their results are in the record books anyway.
The best case for Cejudo
Here’s his strongest point, and it deserves a fair hearing: freestyle in Dagestan is brutally deep, not everyone reaches the top of it, and some athletes surely do drift toward other mats when the wrestling ladder runs out of rungs.
Grant all of that. It still proves nothing about who’s better at fighting. A pipeline is a different thing from a ranking. If some kids left wrestling for Sambo, they left for a ruleset that looks far more like a cage fight than freestyle ever will, and the cage then told us exactly how that decision worked out. Measuring Khabib by whether he could have medaled in freestyle is like grading a heavyweight boxer on his amateur sprint times. Interesting trivia, wrong test.
Cejudo himself sort of gave the game away. In the same conversation, by Bloody Elbow’s account, he conceded that he probably wouldn’t be able to hang with these Dagestani grapplers in Real American Freestyle Wrestling competition, since he’s spent years focused on MMA. So the Sambo guys are too weak for wrestling, and also the Olympic champion would likely lose to them on a wrestling mat. Those two ideas don’t sit comfortably in the same breath.
Why he keeps doing this
None of this is new for him. Cejudo has already ranked himself above Khabib in the GOAT conversation, and this isn’t the first time he’s taken a shot at the Russian legend’s credentials. At 39, with his UFC career behind him, he’s been staying busy everywhere. He made his professional boxing debut in September and is talking about a run in that sport. He’s 1-1 against Merab Dvalishvili in RAF, having lost a decision in July before beating him in their rematch, and there’s talk of a trilogy.
I like that version of Cejudo, the one still pulling on a singlet and testing himself against a reigning champion’s wrestling. That guy respects the mat. He should extend the same respect to the men who built something different on it.
Wrestling may well be king in Dagestan. The Sambo kids just went and won the war in a different country, under different rules, and Khabib walked away from it at 29-0 without anyone ever beating him in the cage.
