Ilia Topuria says his loss to Justin Gaethje sent him into months of self-questioning. In a preview of an upcoming interview that ABC Diario posted on social media Thursday, the former two-division champion called the June 14 defeat at UFC Freedom 250, held on the White House South Lawn, the low point of his professional life.
“I’ve been in the worst situation a fighter can possibly be in,” Topuria said. “I have experienced the worst day of my career. What’s worse than that? Dying? Was something off? That is a question I’ve had to face over the last five or six months.”
The physical damage matched the emotional one. Topuria has said both of his orbital bones were fractured, his septum was broken and his foot was broken. He was taken to the hospital right after the fight, and the moment he saw his reflection there has become the image he keeps coming back to. He first described it in early September, in a letter to his son Hugo: “I remember waking up and looking at myself in the mirror. For a few seconds, I did not recognize the face staring back at me.”
The shock makes sense given how he got there. Topuria walked onto the South Lawn at 17-0, coming off back-to-back knockouts of Alexander Volkanovski, Max Holloway and Charles Oliveira, and the betting odds heavily backed him to add Gaethje to that list. Instead Gaethje battered him until his corner stopped the fight in Round 4, one of the biggest upsets in UFC history. Topuria is now 17-1.
Gaethje has been here before. On the Joe Rogan Experience, he compared Topuria’s situation to Tony Ferguson’s after UFC 249, where Gaethje snapped Ferguson’s 12-fight win streak with a Round 5 TKO as the underdog. Gaethje said he broke the perception that Topuria was unbeatable, suggested the mental recovery would be hard, and added that he still expects Topuria to bounce back eventually.
Topuria has a plan for that. He told ABC Diario he’s targeting a return from April 2027 onward, and Dana White has confirmed the comeback is set for 2027. Topuria had already posted gym photos hinting at a return, and he promised fans would see him “Like you have never seen him before.” He also named his preferred opponent, Paddy Pimblett, without much subtlety. “Paddy, Paddy, Paddy,” Topuria said. “I’ll eat him like a sausage, which he is.”
My take: the sausage line is fun, and nobody should mistake it for evidence of anything. Topuria built that 17-0 run on calm, compact counterpunching, and the version of him I want to see in April is one who walks out with something new rather than the same plan delivered with more anger. Fighters who come back from a first loss trying to erase it tend to rush. The ones who come back having studied it tend to stick around. He’s giving himself roughly 10 months between a broken face and a broken foot and his next walkout, which is the right call. Whoever is across the cage in 2027, I’ll be watching his first two minutes of Round 1 more closely than anything he says this winter.
